766 

125 




J 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL; 

ou, 

THE ■ IDEA OF 
CHRISTIAN PERFECTIBILITY. 



A TRACT, IN TWO PARTS. 




By R. W. MACKAY, M.A., 



Author of 'The Progress of the Intellect," 'A Sketch of the History or 
Christianity,'' ' The Tubingen School and its Antecedents,' &c. &c. &c. 



PART I. <f- /W~L / 2L_ 



A'urds 'avTov eKaaros apiaros (pv\a£. 
4t Every man his own best guardian.' 

Plato Politeia 2, p. 367 



WILLIAMS AND NORGATE. 

14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, AND 
20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH ; 

AND 

THOMAS SCOTT, 

MOUNT PLEASANT, RAM SG ATE 
1807, 



Nor should'st thou marvel more, if right I deem, 
At thy ascent, than that from mountain high 
Down to the lowest plain descends a stream; 
More wonder, truly, if thou hadst remained 
Inert below, although made free to rise, 
Like living fire to rest on earth constrained. 

Dante, Paradiso, Canto 1, Wright's Translation. 

The Library 
of Congress 

washington 



PREFACE. 



♦ 



HE aim of this tract, whose title is of ancient 



JL date, is to show religion to be essentially 
morality, and morality very seriously and em- 
phatically religion. But to make good the 
assertion and complete the identity, something 
more than popular or utilitarian ethics is re- 
quired ; and it is precisely this something which 
gives a religious character to a satisfactory moral 
theory. Such a theory cannot rest on a merely 
empirical basis ; it must include the ideal element 
which Christianity has, and which political eco- 
nomy has not. 

To this it may be said that if Christianity be 
the thing wanted, it should be simply accepted 




vi. 



Preface. 



without suggesting new names or invidious dis- 
tinctions. And the remonstrance would be un- 
answerable were Christianity popularly extant in 
its pure and genuine form. But the case is far 
otherwise, the conventionalities now bearing the 
name being little more than a caricature ; and 
hence one object of the following pages will be 
to trace the origin and progress of disfigurement, 
and also the process of reformation, by which in 
recent times the true Gospel has been disengaged 
from irrelevant or noxious superfluities, so as to 
re-appear in its simply ethical character. 

The execution of this latter task is the purport 
of the present Part ; the other, forming the con- 
clusion, will shortly follow. 



CONTENTS. 



♦ 

PAGE 

1. Religion and its Counterfeit - 1 

2. Christianity— True and Spurious 4 

3. Is Christianity a Following of the Person ? - 9 

4. Ambiguities of Christian Literature - - 14 

5. St Paul's Gift of the Spirit - - 23 

6. Severance of the Spiritual and the Mechanical - 25 

7. Gnosticism - - - 27 

8. The Montanists - - - 31 

9. Manichseism and Monkery - 35 

10. The "Eternal Gospel" of Abbot Joachim and 

the Schismatical Franciscans - 36 

11. The Reformation - - 40 

12. Spinoza and the Deists - - 43 

13. Discussion of the Problem of Biblical Revelation 46 

14. Displacement of Outward by Inward Criteria - 51 

15. Fichte's Critique of Revelation - 58 



THE ETERNAL 



GOSPEL; 



OR, 

THE IDEA OF 

CHRISTIAN PERFECTIBILITY. 
♦ 

RELIGION AND ITS COUNTERFEIT. 

MORE than two thousand years ago, Xenophanes 
is said to have warned his fellow-townsmen 
how religion is an internal thing, not discoverable so 
much in temple ceremonial as in the recesses of their 
own souls ; and yet in the same city the same vain 
ceremonies are still enacted at the noisy festival of 
St Agata, in practices understood by none less than 
by those concerned in the performance. The Epistle to 
the Hebrews summons the Christian convert to leave 
rudimentary elements (i.e., the weak and beggarly 
elements already deprecated by St Paul), and to 
advance from childishness to perfection. Unfortu- 
nately the crowd of vrj7riot are unable, even in broad 
daylight, to see beyond themselves, and there is 
always a large class interested in teaching them the 

B 



2 The Eternal Gospel; or y the 



opposite lesson of indolent acquiescence, to the effect 
that they possess perfection already ; and hence when 
they talk about reform they never think of reforming 
themselves or their religion. Considered in its true 
meaning of an untiring striving towards the infinite, 
religion assuredly has as little to do with confessional 
and ritualistic formulas as with the apples of the 
Hesperides or the purple and fine linen of Episcopal 
palaces ; nor does it acknowledge any fixed artificial 
limits of human establishment and teaching. The 
soul's inwardly prompted impulse towards a Divine 
reunion may be taught by outward things, but is not 
originated by them ; and, however beneficial the aids 
of traditional wisdom or social encouragement relied 
upon to help its career, these, instead of aiding, 
become misleading, when instead of being employed 
as means they are mistaken for the end itself. Men 
are hampered by their ways and means ; the tools 
they are obliged to use embarrass them ; persons, 
words, and conventional notions, throw inevitable dust 
into their eyes. The source of misapprehension is in the 
mental feebleness which, unable to sustain itself in the 
pure aether of the ideal, idolatrously confounds things 
in themselves useful and excellent, a gifted teacher for 
instance, or a familiar form of words, with the unseen 
object of aspiration. In individual cases the supersti- 
tious infatuation thus engendered leads, as intimated 
in the above quoted passage in the Hebrews (vi. 4 — 6), 
to moral torpor and death ; yet in the race there is 
always a power of self-recovery, urged by that inex- 
tinguishable longing for something better, which 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 3 



breaks through incrustations of prejudice, and initi- 
ates a new career of healthy activity. 

And hence, since man feels the high instincts of 
his destiny long before he can adequately describe or 
explain them, there has always existed a presenti- 
ment that beyond existing forms and institutions, 
especially those of outwardly established Christianity, 
something higher and better is still to be expected ; 
an everlasting Gospel, a kingdom of the spirit, an 
empire of reason, a judgment of the past comprised 
within a future restoration or regeneration, in which 
all that now seems wanting shall be attained, and all 
that is depraved or superfluous extinguished. The 
inevitable inequalities of culture and capability result- 
ing in various types of religious proficiency suggested 
yearnings of this kind from an early date. St Paul, 
with all his enthusiasm, had to submit to certain 
compromises ; but he had the satisfaction of foresee- 
ing that when that which is perfect should come, 
then that which is in part would cease ; and as 
the Epistle to the Ephesians goes on to say, " all 
would come in unity of faith and knowledge unto the 
measure of perfect man and the full maturity of 
Christ. " Rest and finality are the natural watch- 
words of politicians ; of religion, so far as resting in 
its true nature and uncontaminated by politics, pro- 
gress is the very essence ; and in this sense Clement 
of Alexandria and Origen anticipate, in their notions 
of a growing perfection and an " eternal gospel,"* the 



* See Revelations xiv., 6, and Origen de Principiis, iv., ch. 25, Rede- 
penning, p. 364. 

B 2 



4 



The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



theories of progress broached in later times with 
more or less of limitation by Bacon, Descartes, 
and Pascal ; though with them it was not the 
caricature imagined by later utilitarianism, the con- 
summation expected by the alchy mists and Condor- 
cet, the heaven of eudaBmonism and Plato's " city of 
swine," but a real and general elevation of man's 
nature, not the mere selfish nature commonly kuown 
to experience, but the growing soul, the embryo 
divinity. 

CHRISTIANITY — TRUE AND SPURIOUS. 

When Christianity first emerged from Jewish 
externalities, its objects were of a truly elevated cha- 
racter, consisting in ideal felicity as an end, ideal 
purity or " righteousness " as the means. The aim 
of Jesus, as intimated in the Sermon on the Mount, 
was to place men in a truly moral relation to God 
and to each other ; giving so wide an extension to 
the meaning of Mosaic law as virtually to identify it 
with ideal or divine law, thus enabling it not only 
to control the act, but to purify the mental sources 
of action ; and so to convert men from mere obedient 
machines into really moral beings. The message was 
especially addressed to the poor and to the sinful ; 
not as though sin and poverty were in themselves 
estimable, or entitled to confer any special privilege ; 
but because the tendency of such calamities is to sober 
and to spiritualize, to engender, in short, the kingdom 
of heaven in the soul ; because sin leads naturally 
to contrition in unsophisticated and affectionate 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility* 5 



natures ; because poverty is calculated to purify the 
thoughts by diverting them from worldly specula- 
tions to that region where alone true wealth is to be 
found. 5 * These essentially spiritual principles were 
properly speaking, independent of external authority, 
as carrying their own witness along with them and 
writing their impress in the heart. But spiritual 
things are foolishness to unspiritual and mechanically- 
minded persons ; and so by a natural illusion the 
teacher was confounded with the lesson, and the pure 
feelings and convictions of ethical and intellectual 
religion were eclipsed and superseded by idolatry 
of the person. It was truly said by Mr Gladstone, in 
his late Edinburgh. Address, that " systems of Reli- 
gion, however perfect for their purpose, however 
divine in conception and expression, yet of necessity 
become human too from the first moment of their 
contact with humanity ; from the very time, that is, 
when they begin to do their proper work by laying 

* Goethe, in his illustration of " the three Reverences " in 4 Wilhelm 
Meister's Travels,' falls into more than one error, especially where he 
terms Christianity a "reverence for things beneath us," the recognition 
of sin, poverty, and disgrace, as divine. This is a mistake which Mr 
Carlyle {Times, April 4th, 1866) ought not to have repeated. These things 
are, assuredly, not treated as objects of love and honour in themselves, 
but only as outward furtherances or indications of the presence of the 
Kingdom of Heaven in the soul •, in fact, of a temper and frame of mind 
ideally reversing them ; present poverty, for instance, being likely to 
carry home to the feelings the consolatory antithetical assurance of the 
true riches hereafter. All the so-called " Beatitudes," with their several 
contrasts of poverty and plenty, sorrow and joy, persecution and triumph, 
&c, are only so many descriptive illustrations of the same ideal state of 
mind, making what has been termed the Christian Paradox. The same 
feeling is emphatically set out in n Corinthians vi., 10, and in the Epistle 
to Diognetus, Justini M. Op : Colonise, 1686, p. 497. 



6 The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



hold of men's minds and hearts." At the origin of 
Christianity there existed many puerile ideas natu- 
rally more or less affecting and distorting its earliest 
forms, such as the belief in miracles and demoniacal 
agency which it incidentally countenanced, and the 
routine of prayer and punctilious ceremonialism 
against which it was a partial protest ; but perhaps 
the most noxious of prevalent hallucinations was the 
spiritual pride and national exclusiveness making the 
Jews the last to bow before the Roman power, which 
gradually broke down the barriers of special nation- 
alities, thus preparing the way for a wider civilization, 
and the idea of human brotherhood. This national 
feeling of the Jews was at the time concentrated in 
the idea of a great deliverer or Messiah, who was to 
restore the glory of the ancient theocratic kingdom 
as it existed in the time of David and Solomon ; and 
it was scarcely possible for any influential teacher 
coming forward under such circumstances in entire 
plenitude of independent religious conviction, to avoid 
being in some sense confounded by himself and 
others with this expected personage. Jesus, we are 
told, assumed this inevitable character only in a spi- 
ritual sense, as king* of an invisible and moral king- 
dom ; nevertheless the strong personal influence of 
one so characterized and connected with popular 
political expectations, tended from the first to mis- 
lead as to the real nature of his mission by mixing 
it up with extrinsic and titular considerations. 
With the Messiahship of Jesus, belief in his resur- 
rection and future triumphant return were neces- 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 7 



sarily associated; so that an acknowledgment of 
these two fundamental verities became the formal 
criterium of Christian fellowship. And then the 
outward criterium constituting a man a Christian 
in the eyes of the world, was readily accepted 
as in itself sufficient proof of his possessing 
the internal qualifications of a Christian ; the long 
battle of the claim of essential purity against the 
sufficiency of outward conformity, carried on from 
the time of the Montanists to that of the Donatists, 
ending, as was to be expected, in the victory of the 
more easy and practical test. And so in the sequel 
what had been at first intended as a purely spiritual 
reform, degenerated into a dead formalism, mainly 
characterized by personal and idolatrous adulation ; 
abstruse metaphysical distinctions as to the mysteries 
of Christ's nature and his relation to the Godhead, 
his sacrificial atonement, and his expected return 
to judgment, became the all- en grossing subjects for 
contemplation ; in the way of practice, a formal 
routine, confounding outward observances with moral 
essentials, obscured or superseded the weightier 
matters ; and since it is more injurious to disbelieve 
the assurances of a superior than to disobey his 
orders, and neglect of personal injunctions is more 
directly offensive than forgetfulness of natural obli- 
gation, heresy came to be thought worse than moral 
depravity,* 5 and the more irrationally arbitrary the 

* Origen gives a striking example of this when (Comment, on Matth. 
33) he says: "Malum quidem est invenire aliquem secundum vitae 
mores errantem ; multo autem pejus arbitror esse in dogmatibus errare, 
et non secundum verissimam regulam scripturarum sentire." 



8 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



command, the more mysteriously sacred and impera- 
tive appeared the duty ; so that morality fell more 
and more into the shade, superseded on one hand by 
dogmatical creed, on the other by mechanical pre- 
ceptualism. 

To the corruptions arising from imperfections 
of human thought and expression were soon 
added those arising from the necessary defects 
of human association. In this, in addition to other 
sources of mischief, individual conscience is ever 
required to bow to conditions of expediency, to 
necessities of administration, to the need of adjusting- 
current beliefs to average capacities. The merging 
of individual action in social aggregates almost 
always tends to weaken the feeling of responsibility, 
and to corrupt, if not efface, the gentler as well as 
nobler qualities of human nature and nowhere is 
this more signally manifested than in religious 
associations or Churches. By these the spiritual 
element of religion is more and more discouraged in 
deference to necessities of policy ; intolerance, hatred,, 
and hypocrisy growing in proportion to the radical 
incongruity between the inordinate claims of arti- 
ficial establishments and the irrepressible impulses 
of nature and conscience. The Church spoken of by 
Jesus as built upon a rock was the ideal or invisible 
one, whose foundations are truth and goodness ; but 
the prerogatives of the true are habitually usurped 
by local establishments in order to exaggerate their 
self-importance, and to strengthen their claim to the- 

* See Tio.es of May 19, 1865. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 9 



submission of their members. While professing to 
be the legitimate guardians of truth and virtue, they 
betray the interests of both. For truth, which is 
humanly attainable only in partial glimpses and by 
progressive efforts, they substitute a set of artificially 
constructed propositions to be evermore asserted as 
sufficient and infallible ; for virtue, instead of an 
inward conversion of the soul, they can only exact 
obedience to an external preceptualism, w r hich, the 
more successful the effort to hunt the conscience 
into a corner, only the more surety succeeds in 
making men hypocrites or slaves. The best success 
of Churches consists in lulling fanaticism in false 
security, in throwing a comfortable veil over the 
awful problems of existence, in reducing duty from 
the level of an heroic struggle to that of an easy but 
unmeaning routine. The effort to incorporate the 
free spirit of religion in political establishments is 
like attempting to " make music malleable ; " to look 
for it in Churches is to seek the living among the 
dead. 



IS CHRISTIANITY A FOLLOWING OF THE PEES0N ? 

At all times men are less influenced by a rational 
consideration for what is said than by regard for the 
person saying it ; since it is always far more easy to 
recognize personal appearances and qualifications 
than to discriminate truth. This was especially the 
case in the time of Jesus : a purely spiritual lesson 
would have had little chance of success if put forth 



io The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



in an abstract form ; it was necessary to appeal to the 
senses, and particularly to give to the lesson, so far as 
possible, the stamp of personal and official authority. 
And hence it has been lately said* to have been the 
primary aim of Jesus to cultivate a good disposition 
in his followers by drawing them out of themselves 
through a devoted admiration for his person. But 
then Jesus is stated to have emphatically discounten- 
anced personal homage, saying that the only good 
being was God, that man's really essential duty was 
not the personal following or piteously addressing 
him as "Lord," but obeying his commands, or 
" doing the things which he said." And it so happens 
that the personal attachment which in his own day 
may really be presumed to have been good evidence 
of a spiritual disposition, is by no means so at the 
present time, when the tide of popularity has turned, 
and an eager assumption of the name is an easy and 
common disguise for absence of the thing. " Well 
for you," says Lessing in his drama Nathan the Wise, 
" well for you that he was so good a man that you 
could take his virtue upon trust. Yet why talk of 
virtue ? Not his virtue, but only his name is every- 
where trumpeted as that of one infinitely surpassing 
all men before and after ; truly your Christianity is a 
thing of mere words and names ! " 

Certainly we do find within the limits of the Gospel 
narratives the utmost importance occasionally at- 
tached to personal following, and this very peculiarity 
has lately been with better reason made the subject 
* See.an anonymous work entitled ' £cce Homo.' Macinillan, I860. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility . 



ii 



of strong animadversion by one* who well observes 
that " the arbitrary tone of precepts imposed from 
without, and given independently of any attempt to 
recommend them to the heart or understanding, alone 
suffices to make them repulsive and pernicious. 
When, for instance, to the question of the rich young 
man, " What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? " 
Jesus is said to have replied, — not by seizing the 
favourable opportunity for imparting spiritual in- 
struction by describing the nature of internal right- 
eousness, but by an arbitrary command to sell his 
property for the use of the poor, and to follow him- 
self, this must be said to have been a subversion of 
the very basis of true morality, and to have sug- 
gested a line of conduct in regard to new converts 
which the self-interested ambition and dictatorial 
tendencies of later teachers and churches was but too 
sure to repeat and to make use of. And yet in those 
exhortations, in listening to which it may be pre- 
sumed that the advantage of following him mainly 
consisted, Jesus directs attention not to himself, but 
to the perfect pattern of God ; and certainly what- 
ever advantage a bright, or even a perfect, example,t 
acting through the senses and imagination, may have 

* See Mr F. W. Newman's Sermon on Hero-Making, p. 15. 

t "Longuni est iter per precepta," says Seneca (Epist. vi., p. 16), 
" breve et efficax per exempla." " Vir bonus," ke says in another place, 
" est eligendus et semper ante oculos habendus" (Epist. xi). In other 
words, the force of opinion and personal authority may profitably be 
made a part of our provisional education ; yet it does not follow that 
such influences are the highest and best, or that Cato and Socrates were 
ultimately so directed. 



1 2 The Eternal Gospel ; cr, the 



over abstract lessons, the advantage is always liable 
to be counterpoised by the possible confinement of 
the effect to the lower faculties of the imitator re- 
garding some inferior characteristic of the object, 
leaving the higher unimproved. The means are easily 
substituted for the end ; and it must still be asked, 
what, in the dazzling example proposed for imitation, 
is the real object of attachment ? Is it the virtue, or 
only the dignity and outward appearance ? Or is it 
perchance the miraculous abundance of loaves, the 
earthly or heavenly rewards offered for distribution 
in his train ? The character of Jesus, as depicted in 
the Gospels, now constituting the sole source of our 
information concerning him, has been said with truth 
to be not without apparent blemishes ; blemishes in- 
terfering with its imaginary excellence considered as 
that of a man, and wholly irreconcilable with the 
attributes of a God. Among these are his occasional 
struggles and hesitations, the insufficiency of his 
announcements and explanations, as proved by sub- 
sequent controversies and the painfully elaborated 
changes in his religion; his frequent ignorance 
of facts, and ready acquiescence in the superstitious 
notions of his day ; his puerile exegesis of the Old Tes- 
tament, and especially the ascetical type of character 
sometimes recommended ; for instance, the living as 
the lilies and offering the cheek to the smiter, conduct 
which is no longer either desirable or practicable. 
Hence the suppression of the postulate of an absolutely 
divine character by many, who nevertheless endea- 
vour, by excessive exaggeration of the hypothetic 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 13 



excellences of the human, to win back all the advan- 
tages of superstitious admiration ostensibly sur- 
rendered ; virtually withdrawing the personal excel- 
lences from the category of human by extolling them 
as of an absolutely unique and perfect kind. And 
thus opinion remains conveniently suspended between 
mortality and divinity, although the divinity is con- 
fessedly only the reflection of an habitual illusion 
from the clouded surface of tradition; tradition 
which, as truly said by the Roman historian, loves to 
exaggerate the first commencements of cities and of 
men in proportion to the subsequent greatness and 
historical success of their career.* But without fur- 
ther dwelling on this topic, it suffices to reflect that 
true religion consists not in contingent facts and pro- 
blematical histories, but in spiritual truths ; the 
latter retaining their freshness through all time, the 
former losing their value in proportion to their 
remoteness and the obscurities of the documents 
recording them. For us the example is no more 
distinct or living ; its vital warmth is fled, except 
what it collaterally retains as impliedly accruing to 
the teacher from the excellence of his lessons, and 
their correspondence with the inward convictions of 
our own hearts. And if, however excellent, the 
pattern has lost its brilliancy by distance, and the 
haze of antiquity through which alone it is discernible, 
surely the very fact of this uncertainty should warn us 
to look for the true import of Christianity in a different 

* Datur haec Tenia antiquitati, ut miscendo hum an a diyinis primordia 
urbium augustiora faciat. 



14 



The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



direction ; and instead of prowling in the dark among 
dead traditions, to cherish the ever-living truth cor- 
responding to the freshly awakened sentiments, as in 
the narrative the person is said to vanish at the 
instant when the thing is comprehended. (Luke xxiv. 
31). 

AMBIGUITIES OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE. 

The substitution of personal authority for the 
authority of principle, misleading as it was from the 
first, became much more positively mischievous when 
blended with the impure motives and selfish policy 
of a Church ; when for the moral change of a new 
life men were led to substitute a system of external 
formalities and compliances, accompauied by a theory 
of atonement effected by a transaction altogether 
outside the limits of the soul. This presentment 
under one name of two heterogeneous things, 
one a prolific and eternal truth, the other an 
external husk or accessory, has ever thrown am- 
biguity over the Christian profession, mingling a 
rightful claim to perpetuity with the indispensable ne- 
cessity of a radical renovation. And hence one source 
of the complexities and obscurities in Christian litera- 
ture, which, as remarked by Schelling,* will be found 
already to contain anticipatory traces of all later 
doctrinal divergencies. St Paul, knowing Christ in 
a spiritual sense only, strove hard to restore to the 
religion that exclusively spiritual character which 

* Philosophie der Offenbarung, sect. 37, p. 327. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 15 



alone could enable it to live, to pass its original 
boundaries, and rightfully to claim universal alle- 
giance. To its genuine essence be very naturally 
gave the name of faith, meaning by this term not so 
much belief in a doctrine as the origination of a new 
principle of life in humanity, the regeneration of 
the old Adam by the Lord's descent into the heart ; 
but he forgot, in his superabundant reliance on the 
efficacy of an altered disposition, that, by disavowing 
the narrow traditions and slavish coercion of Jewish 
law, he was endangering the security of all law. And 
so an essentially correct principle proved to be fatally 
at issue with practical conditions ; for the law of love 
or law of the spirit advocated by St Paul was of too 
refined and impalpable a nature to be commonly 
understood. B,ude men still required a law evident 
and tangible, just as the Jews had in times past 
required a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ ; and 
not only habitual prejudice but practical necessi- 
ties were felt to be incompatible with a mode of 
teaching whose ill-understood liberality is admitted 
even by its author to have given more or less occasion 
for licentiousness. Hence the commencement of a 
long conflict between spiritual Christianity and the 
necessities of establishment ; — faith and the law of 
works became the watchwords of two parties, the 
liberally minded and the Judaically disposed, of those 
who, following St Paul, treated the religion as a new 
one superseding the old, and those who, holding the 
theory of the continuity of revelation, considered it 
only as its most perfect form and last consummation. 



1 6 The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



All these differences give a complex and, to a great 
extent, inconsistent character to Christian literature^ 
which naturally exhibits traces of the varieties of 
opinion among which it originated ; these, if not, as 
Augustin* claimed, to be blindly honoured, should at 
all events be studied ; for it is in consequence of them 
that some of the New Testament books, as the Apoca- 
lypse, have an especially Jewish leaning ; that others 
exhibit the mystical quietism and objective speculation 
characteristic of the Greek Church ; while the larger 
proportion show a conciliatory anxiety to reconcile 
extreme opinions by mutual limitation and conces- 
sion, so preparing the way for that ultimate form of 
compromise which became the orthodoxy of the 
Eoman. At first the living word of oral tradition 
was almost exclusively appealed to, especially when 
St Paul's written addresses to distant congregations 
had given alarm by the first hints of strange and 
suspicious doctrine. The early Christian Apologists 
argue almost exclusively from the Old Testament; 
and Justin, when referring to " Apostolical Memo- 
rials," generally deems it necessary to fortify their 
authority by Old Testament citations. Different 
books were used at pleasure in different churches, 
until the time when heresy, propagated far and wide 
by Gnostic writings, began to give practical evidence 
of the clanger of literary freedom ; and then, con- 
currently with the concentration of Episcopal Church 
government, there occurred that gradual concentra- 
tion and revision of Church literature, which, under 
* Augustin, Sermon 51, vol. v., p. 408. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 17 



long-continued influences of theological preference 
and party bias, ultimately settled down into " the 
Canon." This is not to be understood as meaning a 
law or rule of belief, but only as a list or catalogue 
of certain writings selected and appointed by the 
Church, and hence artificially invested with a nor- 
mative character. Yet these writings, however 
cautiously selected, are far from being unanimous ; 
they still retain traces of the diversities and conflicts 
of early Christianity, and their differences, which 
have given so much trouble to harmonizing expositors, 
are in reality interesting memorials of a state of 
conflict of which, except as thus indirectly exhibited, 
there are few extant records. Hence the apparently 
tame character of some of the writings, and the 
complex texture and controversial tone of others, 
especially of the Gospels ; a phenomenon most fre- 
quently originated by the desire to claim the authority 
of Christ himself for the diversities of institution 
and doctrine current among Christians. Among the 
peculiarities of the Gospels may be mentioned the 
generally Hebraical tendency and tone of Matthew, 
the Pauline leaning manifested in many parts of 
Luke ; the difference of pedigree in the first and third, 
that in the fourth Gospel as to the theatre of the 
ministry of Jesus, this again involving other differ- 
ences, such as that as to the date of the Temple 
cleansing, and as to the locality of the prophet's 
" country." A curious but characteristic variation 
which has been little noticed, is that in the sense 
attached in the different Gospels to the " salt ; " in 

C 



1 8 The Eternal Gospel ; or y the 



Matthew it is applied to the Apostles as heralds of 
Christian doctrine ; in Luke xiv. 34, probably not 
without good reason, it is withdrawn from them, and 
made a mere general type of Christian constancy ; in 
Mark ix. 49, 50, it is connected with sacrificial minis- 
tration and conjoined or counterbalanced by the great 
ecclesiastical requisite of "peace," in a manner cha- 
racteristic of this Evangelist, but which, without more 
knowledge of the circumstances, it is hard exactly to 
understand. Origen argues that the Gospel differ- 
ences, being undeniably real, and otherwise unintel- 
ligible, must be explained as ideal mysteries by 
allegorical interpretation ; but their meaning is not 
to be hastily and fancifully caught in this manner ; 
it is only when the historical evidence has been 
thoroughly sifted, and the position and purpose of the 
writers ascertained, that the true import of the docu- 
ments can be rightly understood. 

But there are also differences in the several 
Gospels, taken alone and individually, showing how 
heterogeneous were the ideas of their respective 
compilers almost from the first. For example, the 
mode in which true righteousness, as opposed to the 
external righteousness of Scribes and Pharisees, is 
described in the sermon on the mount, is to a great 
extent neutralized and contradicted by the proviso 
inserted in our Bibles near the commencement of the 
discourse (Matt. v. 18), that " until heaven and earth 
should pass away," all the minutiae of the law would 
be strictly enforced. The kind of observance here 
insisted on destroys the continuity and consistency 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 19 

of the discourse, which throughout the series of 
illustrations following, aims at correcting hypocrisy 
and immorality at their source, — endeavouring to 
substitute inward purity of soul for the outward 
technicalities of observance insisted on by Scribes 
and Pharisees ; and though we can well understand 
how this passage, with its apparent allusion to St 
Paul (v. 19), came to be surreptitiously inserted for 
a special object by the Judaical party among the 
early Christians, to the uninitiated in the early history 
it exercises a bewildering and sinister influence in 
the position which it occupies, throwing obscurity 
over the meaning of the whole. Indeed, the Gospel 
which, of all others, is the most illiberally Judaical, 
which protests against giving the children's meat to 
dogs, and casting pearls before swine (Matt. vii. 6 ; x. 
6 ; xxv. 24, 26), contains some of the most enlarged 
and liberal announcements as to the independence 
and universalism of Christianity, the admission of the 
Gentiles, and exclusion of the Jews. (Matt. viii. 11, 
12 ; ix. 16 ; xxii. 7, 8 ; xxiv. 14 ; xxviii. 19.) There 
is a corresponding inconsistency in the delineation 
here given of the nature of Christianity itself ; for 
the kingdom of Heaven, growing up invisibly and 
silently in men's minds, — like seed in the ground, or 
like leaven in meal (Matt, xviii. 31, 33), is the very 
reverse of the outward consummation anticipated in 
a sudden and immediate return of the Son of Man 
in the clouds, accompanied by eclipse of sun and 
moon and by the trumpet-call of the elect. (Matt, 
x. 23 ; xvi. 28 ; xxiv. 27, 36.) Similar contradictions 

c 2 



zo The Eternal Gospel ; cr, the 



occur in Luke, only with the difference that here the 
more liberal and comprehensive view takes the fore- 
most place, the coarser Judaical representations 
appearing as superadded. Thus the kingdom, 
preached from the days of John the Baptist, is 
freely open to all comers (Luke xvi. 16), — not, as in 
the parallel passage in Matthew, a privilege violently 
invaded and usurped ; the acceptance of the Gentiles 
and rejection of the Jews having, indeed, been indi- 
rectly indicated from the very first (Luke ii. 32 ; iv. 
24, 26). Hence, too, the omission of several pas- 
sages specially favourable to Jewish claims (Matt, 
xvi. 17), and inimical to St Paul (Matt. xiii. 25, 28 : 
comp. Clem. ; Horn. ; Epistola Petri, 2 ; Dressel, p. 4) ; 
and especially the indication of the spiritual nature 
of the kingdom of Heaven (Luke xvii. 20). But 
these passages are again qualified by others of 
different tendency ; and if Luke, as here presented 
to us, is generally more Pauline than Matthew, he is 
also on several occasions more characteristically and 
emphatically Jewish. 

The Evangelists had doubtless special reasons for 
mixing up heterogeneous statements. They had to 
please readers of very different kinds, to reconcile 
adverse theories, to mediate between conflicting fac- 
tions ; and this they endeavoured to effect, not by 
uniform and consistent inferences, which, in all pro- 
bability would have pleased neither party ; but by 
balancing one statement against another, in such a 
way as to leave every one to think about the matter 
as he pleased, and to draw his own conclusion. Luke 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 21 



is especially remarkable for the pointed manner in 
which he places uncongenial and even contradictory 
sentiments in juxtaposition, an artilice exactly similar 
to the undecided self-contradictory theology of our 
own day. Thus, in chapter xvi. 16, the concession as 
to the admission of Gentiles into the kingdom of 
Heaven, is balanced if not neutralized in the follow 
ing verse by insisting on the continuing obligation of 
all the minutise of the law. In the same chapter a 
commendation of the worldly wisdom of the unjust 
steward, is somewhat awkwardly and abruptly con- 
nected with the inconsistent announcement of the 
impossibility of simultaneously serving God and 
mammon ; and again after the announcement that the 
advent of the kingdom of Heaven was not to be 
external and conspicuous (Luke xvii. 20), there im- 
mediately follows an intimation of a directly opposite 
kind. So too after stating the incompatibility of new 
wine and old bottles, it is pointedly suggested that 
after all the old wine is better (Luke v. 39) ; and in 
the same spirit of continuing allegiance to old beliefs, 
it is said that those who would not hear Moses and 
the Prophets, would remain unconverted even though 
one rose from the dead. 

But perhaps some of the most remarkable instances 
of the juxtaposition of incongruous elements are to 
be found in the fourth Gospel; and certainly no 
small portion of the difficulty felt in understanding 
it, arises from the way in which the writer deliberately 
addresses himself to the task of propounding a nar- 
rative of an elevated, but still pre-eminently popular 



22 The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



and Catholic character, in which the opinions of all 
parties should be adequately represented. Recent 
critics usually describe this Gospel, as Clemens Alex- 
andrinus did of old (Euseb. H. E. vi. 14), as the 
especially " spiritual " one, looking beyond corporeal 
things, and often intentionally transforming them. 
But this expresses only one side of this remarkable 
composition, which, if in many respects the most 
elevated and spiritual, is in others the most material 
and carnal of all the Gospels (see Strauss' s 6 New 
Life of Jesus, 5 Yol. I., p. 189) ; so that the ordinarily 
attentive reader is startled by anomalies which have 
no existence for the unreflecting, or for one who 
reflecting more deeply than the ordinary criticism, 
considers the literary necessity under which the 
writer lay of accommodating his account to a wide circle 
of very differently minded persons. This it was essen- 
tially necessary for him to do, if his spiritualism was 
to be generally accepted, or to become identified with 
the allowed teaching of the Church. An instance may 
be seen in ch. v. 24, 25, 28, where, beginning with sym- 
bolical language, and taking the first and second advent 
as a spiritual coming, the resurrection and judgment as 
being even now spiritually consummated, the writer 
stops half way, relapses into material miracle, which he 
then exalts in its external significance in propor- 
tion to its spiritual importance ; placing the material 
reappearance of Jesus with his wounds, in a line with 
his spiritual second advent, the future external doom 
side by side with the immediate internal judgment.* 

* 8ee also ch. vi. 11, 35 ; ix. 6, 39 ; xi. 39 ; XX. 25, 27. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



23 



Hence an inevitable mysticism, arising from pro- 
pounding two statements of different kind and 
order, and then leaving the one to be understood 
in or through the other, without saying how far this 
other is to be understood as merely figurative or 
symbolical. The seeming incompatibility of these 
two aspects in the Gospel has led to various miscon- 
ceptions as to its nature ; some on account of the 
supposed irreconcilability, thinking themselves justi- 
fied in distinguishing between the component parts 
as Apostolic or non- Apostolic ; while others, especially 
those of modern times, who love indecision because 
they are themselves undecided, welcome the congenial 
ambiguities of the Gospel, believing its originality 
and uniformity of inspiration on the very ground of 
its vacillations and inconsistencies. 



st paul's gift of the spirit. 



The gift of the spirit, originally claimed as apper- 
taining to all Christians, would in ordinary language 
be called the inward consciousness of a higher nature, 
conferring not only an ability to discover new truth, 
but also to adjudicate upon what is commonly 
assumed as true, including the various phases of 
circumstance and opinion preceding and surrounding 
us. By this a free field is opened to speculation, 
both prospective and retrospective ; for the spirit, as 
St Paul tells us, searcheth all things ; and as inti- 
mated by the fourth Gospel, it was to be the universal 
instructor of the community, recalling things past to 



24 ^ he Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



remembrance, and disclosing things to come. (Cli. 
xiv. 26 ; xvi. 13.) Hence the liberty taken by St 
Paul, the Epistle of Barnabas, and especially the 
Alexandrine Fathers, to assign arbitrary meanings sug- 
gested by later ideas and motives to various passages 
in the Old Testament in the way of allegorical interpre- 
tation ; hence, too, a process of critical separation 
between what was thought genuine and non-genuine 
began to be applied ; # and on the same ground there 
arose the practice, of which tradition shows abun- 
dant traces, of ascribing many ideas and circum- 
stances really of later date to the personal initiation 
of the Apostles, or even of Christ himself ;f nay, 
even of orio-inatino- a voluminous literature of 
Epistles and Gospels bearing the name of Apostles 
or companions of Apostles. The same consciousness 
of free reason, but reason considered as a gift 
divinely imparted or inspired, emboldened St Paul 
not merely to read the Old Testament allegorically, 
but to break with Mosaic law, and to place Christi- 
anity for the first time on a substantive and 
independent footing; to inaugurate it as the absolute 
religion ; the only possible means of human emanci- 
pation from systems which either, like heathenism 
(Rom. i. 22 ; 1 Cor. xii. 2), possessed no principle at 
all, or else like Judaism, only an incomplete and 

* " Tuv /AW ev rais ypcupais hoKifxwv ovrwv, rcav 5c ki&StjKcop" 
Ciena. Homil. ii. 51 ; Clem. ; Alex. Strom, i. 28, p. 425 Tott. 

t Thus, in Ephes. iiL 5, the communication of the Gospel to the heathen 
is said to have been a mystery first revealed to the Apostles by the spirit ; 
although, in ch. ii. 17, the writer had already attributed the communi- 
cation to Jesus. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 25 



unsatisfying one. It should not, however, be over- 
looked that although in the view of the Apostle the 
essence of Christianity is a moral change replacing 
outward compulsion by a new inward spirit or 
principle, called faith, or the presence of the Lord in 
the heart, still this change is not represented as an 
abruptly supernatural novelty, but rather as the 
natural development of a capacity inherent in man ; 
and leading on, as the harvest . is virtually included 
in the seed, to a higher state of existence. And as 
in the regenerated individual, so in the race at large, 
the principle of death reigning from the time of the 
first Adam is supposed to be transmuted since the 
advent of the second Adam to one of peace, liberty, 
and life ; Christ's resurrection being the point of 
transition between two successive periods, and its 
full consummation in the complete victory over death 
being still prospective. In this would be included the 
general resurrection, and also the mysterious change 
of those that should be Christ's at his coming ; and 
then would follow " the end," when all things being 
subdued to Christ, especially the hostile principle of 
death, Christ would resign the kingdom to His 
Father, and God would be all in all. 



SEVERANCE OF THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MECHANICAL. 

The heterogeneous and corrupting influences, traces 
of which appear in Christian literature, produced their 
worst effects in Christian practice. These may 



26 The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



possibly have been foreseen by Jesus himself, sup- 
posing him to have really uttered the saying about 
the new cloth and old garment ; St Paul, at all 
events, observed and reproved the degenerate relapse 
of the Galatian converts, the revival of a Jewish 
routine of formalities, to which, in process of time, 
were added many heathen usages. St Augustin, in 
his work on the City of God, surveyed the world's 
history from a specifically Christian point of view, as 
a gradual disentangle Qient of two intermingling 
but essentially hostile principles ; one, namely the 
celestial, being destined to ultimate victory ; the other, 
the heathen or worldly, to be defeated and extermi- 
nated. But the Christianity of the Church had, in 
his day, already belied this theory by conceding to 
heathenism quite as much as heathenism had to it ; 
in fact it was a compromise suited to please the taste 
of the half-heathen majority ; it succeeded, not by 
extruding noxious and spurious elements, but by com- 
placently welcoming and incorporating them. Hence 
the increasing evils deplored by the Fathers subse- 
quent to the time of Constantine (see Euseb. £ Life of 
Constantine,' iv. 54 ; Augustin on John, Tract 25, 
sec. 10; Chrysost. Horn. 26, and 2 Corinth.), and to 
which Eusebius (H. E. viii. 1) already ascribes the 
retributive persecution of Diocletian, In one striking 
instance more especially, namely, the laxity in con- 
doning offences committed after baptism, a practice 
unknown to earlier times (Heb. vi.4 — 6 ; 1 John v. 16), 
and forming ono of the chief grounds of later schis- 
matical reaction, the Church conspicuously showed 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



27 



how far it had receded from original purity in the 
way of concession to expediency. A growing ten- 
dency to contract freedom of thought within the 
limits of the Church led to the exclusion of the 
Gnostics ; the union of inert fixity with a continually 
relaxing discipline caused the aversion and separation 
of the Montanists. Both of these parties vindicated 
the vitality and freedom which had been an essential 
part of early Christianity, but which within the 
Church were becoming more and more impos- 
sible ; both justified their proceedings and speculations 
by the sanction of the Holy Spirit, that hazardous 
watchword and instrument of Christian liberty, 
which might form a pretext either for the wildest 
innovations or the most salutary corrections. 



GNOSTICISM. 

Speculation, both retrospective and prophetical, 
was intensely active in the early Christian age, its 
wayward flights, unrestrained by practical considera- 
tions of policy, being naturally repelled and denounced 
by the gradually solidifying Church. The Chiliast 
revelled in sanguine prospects of the speedy realiza- 
tion of an ideal future, and the Gnostic, passing in 
review the great religious epochs of the world, con- 
nected them as preparatory stages with his own, and 
thus set the first rude example of theoretical or phi- 
losophical history. To the half natural, half superna- 
tural development of humanity contemplated by St 



28 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



Paul, the metaphysical allegory of the Gnostics bears 
in many of its phases a near resemblance. The 
general aim of Gnosticism was to explain, in a sort of 
spiritual narrative or romance, the great moral pro- 
blem of the world, the canse of evil, of human 
alienation and degeneracy, the paradoxical union of 
extreme weakness with enormous aspirations and 
capacities, together with the means of spiritual reco- 
very introduced by Christ. In some of these theories 
there was a tendency to soften or reverse the usually 
received import of the Fall, which as connected with 
the acquisition of knowledge, would in most cases 
appear to the Gnostic as a rather desirable thing ; 
and hence the attempted classifications of Gnostic 
theories mainly founded on the degree of their respec- 
tive antagonism to former religious systems, especially 
to the Jewish revelation in the Old Testament. All 
religions combine some common elements with others 
which are peculiar and distinctive, and hence a 
variety of classification dependent on narrowness or 
largeness of view, the subjectivity or objectivity of 
the speculator. Between the systems making Chris- 
tianity the last outcome of a continuous cosmogonical 
arrangement, and that of Marcion placing it in an- 
tagonism to all preceding it, the Clementine Homilies 
alone assign to it that precise attitude of connection 
and continuity with former revelation which tallied 
with, the general instincts of the Church. For the 
Church did not repudiate speculation ; on the con- 
trary much of early Christian literature within the 
general limits of orthodoxy contains Gnostic elements ; 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 2y 



even in the New Testament, especially in the fourth 
Gospel, in the Pastorals, in Ephesians, Colossians, 
and Philippians, Gnostic analogies may be recognized ; 
indeed, it was the interest of the Church to admit 
the notion of a growing development, and at all 
events to recognize in the Jewish Theocracy its own 
preparatory foundation. The ideas of Gnosticism 
which offended the Church, were chiefly those which 
sundered the continuity of revelation, those which 
proposed either a dualism severing true religion 
from the Creator of the world, or a continuity effected 
by means of a series of emanated powers obscuring 
the prerogative of Christ, and to a great extent 
effacing the historical as well as the moral import of 
the redemption effected by him. 

The Church, which in the days of Gnosticism was only 
in a nascent state, endeavoured only to regulate and re- 
strain ; as Vincentius Lirinensis afterwards explained, 
— " by all means let science and intelligence increase 
to the utmost ; only go not very far away ; let there 
be no radical innovation ; let us be sure that in all 
seeming alteration there shall be unity in the midst 
of seeming difference ; " and so we come back to the 
great and fundamental source of hostility in the 
denial of freedom ; the bishops and councils are on 
one side, and free speculation on the other. The 
spiritual self-confidence of the Gnostic supplied a pe- 
destal from which he could confidently look back to 
the course of ascent to the high position which he 
presumed himself to occupy ; and symptoms of a 
similar nature continued to appear from time to time 



3<d The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



in the immediate neighbourhood of the rising Church, 
until the influences of establishment, so favourable 
to peace and moderation, but so fatal to freedom, sup- 
pressed not only overt attempts at speculation, but 
even the disposition to think, and the hope and wish 
for better things. At length, the scholastic attempt 
to place stagnation on a scientific basis by linking 
dogma with reason, led to the emancipation of reason 
through the experienced futility of the attempt. The 
relapse of theology into its customary slumber was 
signalised by the rise of nominalism, in which it be- 
came definitively separated from science, leaving the 
latter to labour in comparative freedom in the subor- 
dinate sphere of physical and practical experiment. 
There, in matters exempt from Church control, a 
stand was made ; secular hope revived with secular 
speculation ; and while Machiavelli, Copernicus, and 
others explored the facts of nature and society, Sir 
Thos. More wrote his ' Utopia,' and Bacon announced 
antiquity to have been the world's youth, leaving the 
harvest of its maturity to be reaped by the present 
and the future. 

The idea of progress thus reinstated was further 
developed and applied historically by Yico, Herder, and 
Lessing; and Bossuet had already returned to the views 
of universal history propounded by Augustin. And 
as philosophy enlarged the circle of its subjects, and 
theology withdrew its intolerant pretensions, histor}^ 
especially religious history, begun to be studied in a 
somewhat more independent spirit, often indeed ap- 
pearing in forms allied to those of Gnosticism. Among 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 3 1 



metaphysical speculators of this kind, Jacob Bohme, 
Schelling, and Hegel are the most prominent; though, 
indeed, most modern theorists endeavour to fit Chris- 
tianity, its facts and dogmas, into their own 
systems. Schleiermacher treats it as the absolute 
religion of redemption, ascribing, like St Paul, more 
or less of a miraculous character to the person of its 
founder, but still insisting more on the spiritual sig- 
nificance than the outward fact. His real religion 
was morality ; but he insisted on distinguishing it as 
a peculiar kind of feeling, coming to him in some 
unintelligible way from Christ through the Christian 
community. Others, of whom Herder may be taken 
as the type, looking to history as the record of a 
providential, but not miraculously providential, ar- 
rangement, consider the best fruits and excellences of 
humanity as prospective, taking the whole series of 
past events as contributing to realise a consistent 
design, as the manifestation of a divine plan for the 
education of the human race. 



THE MOKTANISTS. 

Equally inconsistent with ecclesiastical instincts 
was the conduct of those enthusiasts who, seemingly 
the legitimate successors of St Paul's fanatical Corin- 
thians, indulged in visionary anticipation of a spiritual 
dispensation extending beyond the limits of the 
actual, and jeopardizing the stability of establishment 
by too fondly dreaming of things to come. The Mon- 
tanists, like the Gnostics, claimed to be " Pneumatici," 



3 2 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



or spiritualists ; but their spiritualism, instead of 
dwelling on the past, leaned mainly to futurity ; 
manifesting itself more especially in the form of pro- 
phecy, accompanied by austere renunciation of worldly 
indulgences. The original Christian idea of a near 
approach of the end of the world, and the formal 
establishment of the kingdom of Heaven, here assumes 
its most intense form ; while in the general Church 
the same idea was becoming more and more faint 
through lapse of time, and a growing acquiescence in 
worldly necessities and gratifications. Hence the 
simultaneous decrease of fervour and increase of 
iniquity complained of in the Gospel (Matt. xxiv. 12),* 
and the second Epistle of Peter shows (ch. iii. 45) 
how reckless living accompanied the abandonment 
of an expectation which every year contributed to 
render visionary and ridiculous. Still there were not 
wanting those who, like the Montanists, continued to 
cling to the old belief. The chief inspiration of this 
sect would be called in modern language an intense 
confidence in human development, everything later in 
date being, according to Tertullian,f better and more 
Godlike; only from advancing time was to be ex* 
pected the full brilliancy of Divine illumination. The 
form of the new revelation, as suggested by Biblical 
types, was conceived as three successive periods 
of the world, namely its infancy under the law, its 
youth under the Gospel, and its maturity under the 

* Of course to quote the passage in this connection is to assume its 
Icing interpolated. 

t TertuUian De VeL Virgin, i. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility . 



33 



Paraclete. The Churcli did not reject these ideas, but 
carefully reduced them to an innocuous form under 
its own safe keeping. The Fourth Gospel eagerly 
assumes a future progress and consummation to be 
effected by the Paraclete ; but then it carefully con- 
fines the spiritual gift to the Apostles and their suc- 
cessors ; its prayer (xvii. 6, 20) is not for the world 
generally, but only for those chosen from the world 
who were to be associated in the unity of truth ; as 
for those not abiding in this truth, in community 
that is of the " vine " and its legitimate branches, 
they were only fit to be cast aside for burning (ch. 
xv. 6). Here may be clearly seen the guarded liberty 
of life and movement cherished under characteristic 
restrictions in all ages by the Church ; a movement 
not allowed to range freely in the minds of indivi- 
duals, but carefully kept in its own hands and used 
for its own purposes. Indeed, it is the chief evil of 
Churches, that while claiming to represent the highest 
interests of mankind at large, they really represent 
little more than their own corporate interests ; they 
look not to absolute truth and right, but only to that 
seeming to be truth and right in a specially ecclesi- 
astical sense. Church development is a peculiar 
thing ; it means liberty to run in fetters ; not growth 
in the open air, but a stunted expansion in a 
prison house of traditional assumptions. " Prose- 
cutions," said the Times newspaper some time ago,* 1 
" are indispensable to the existence of a church. 

* June 27, 1862. 

D 



34 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



Somewhere a limit must be drawn ; mere opinion is, 
and we trust always will remain, free in this country ; 
a clergyman may doubt, may hold doctrines subver- 
sive of recognized opinions, but he must not teach or 
publish anything at variance with the formularies 
which he is bound to believe." He can, consequently, 
have no option save silence or insincerity ; he must 
veer skilfully between yes and no, balance assertion 
and reservation, utter inoffensive half truths ; in short, 
confine himself to ambiguous prevarication carefully 
steering between opposite risks. Orthodoxy is impera- 
tive, but then it is partially elastic ; and within this 
range of flexibility the official teacher may indulge in 
the luxury of high principle and affect to have a con- 
science. Shaftesbury, in his £ Advice to an author/ 
remarks how hard it is to give advice without 
giving offence at the same time ; and this diffi- 
culty was as well understood by the political 
journal as by the political Church, when it an- 
nounced* that a popular speaker ought not to be 
too original ; one who is so becoming unintelligible, 
and, in fact, disappointing his hearers, who go 
expecting to hear the ordinary views, and only want- 
ing to have their self-complacency flattered by having 
their own opinions pleasantly reflected back from the 
mouth of another. Under such circumstances the 
enthusiasm of the Montanist has even less chance 
of being heard than the subtlety of the Gnostic. 
The uncompromising advocate of progress has 



* Decern!; er G, 1862. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 35 



nothing to hope; sincerity and popularity are in- 
compatible ; the true prophet must go elsewhere ; 
in a priest-ridden community he has only the alter- 
native of silence or the cross. 



MANICH^ISM AND MONKERY. 

Increasing worldliness in the Church perpetually 
created new forms of reaction. The Gnostic and 
Montanist forms of dissent coalesced at a later day 
and were continued by the Manichaeans, who taught 
the same antagonism of good and ill in the world as 
Augustin, but explained their ultimate reconciliation 
in a different manner by appropriating to themselves 
the prediction about the Paraclete. And they were 
the more dangerous to the establishment in pro- 
portion to the fidelity with which they adhered to 
those moral characteristics which the Church had 
deserted. A different form of reaction was that of the 
monks, who aspired to resuscitate what they sup- 
posed to be the true Christian spirit in alliance with 
the Church. Bat monkery was after all only an intensi- 
fied Church within the Church, exhibiting the peculiar 
vices as well as advantages of ecclesiastical discipline 
in an exaggerated form ; a discipline necessarily sub- 
stituting function for intention, severity for sincerity ; 
one quite ineffectual to make men moral, because 
morality is not to be mechanically enforced. Still it 
satisfied appearances, and by affecting a so styled 
"higher virtue" within the Church served to 

d 2 



36 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 

re-establish the credit of the latter in the eye of 
the world. And then Gregory VII., by prohibiting 
priestly marriage, and severing, as far as possible, 
the clerical and civil states, did his utmost to 
extend this pseudo-morality by impressing a monkish 
character upon the Church at large. But the 
hierarchy could not abdicate its proper nature, its 
rule was still a worldly and outward thing, and the 
wealth and power won by ostentatious professions of 
ascetical austerity became at their climax a source of 
discredit and decline. Then came renewed efforts 
of reform both within the Church and without, — 
the bold retort of Gregory VII. 's claim by Arnold 
of Brescia on behalf of civil government, the inde- 
pendent preaching of the Cathari and "Waldenses, 
and also that of the mendicant orders, which ori^i- 
nally calculated to win a vast accession of power for 
the Church, eventually, in one of its branches at 
least, threatened to become its most dangerous 
opponent. 

THE ETERNAL GOSPEL OF ABBOT JOACHIM AND THE 
SCHISMATICAL FRANCISCANS. 

Excited by lively expectations of an approaching 
end of the world, the spirit of reform had appeared 
conspicuously towards the close of the twelfth 
century in the efforts and writings of the Abbot 
Joachim of Floris in Calabria, who, immersed in the 
study of the Bible, especially of the Apocalypse, saw 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 37 

underneath the external pretensions of the all- 
powerful Chnrch the worldliness, avarice, and ambi- 
tion, which were the marks of untruthfulness and 
the presages of ruin. In analogy with Sabellian 
and Montanist theory, he assumed three successive 
stages or epochs of development, corresponding to 
the three persons of the Trinity ; the first or 
" fleshly " stage being the servile condition under 
Jewish law; the second, the comparative emanci- 
pation of the Gospel ; a third period, one of perfect 
spirituality and liberty, was to supersede and surpass 
all the others, to bring about a final release from the 
bondage of the letter by the liberty of the Spirit ; 
it was not embodied in any form of words, but would 
reveal to the soul the true intent and meaning of the 
two existing Testaments ; in short, it was the 
" Eternal Gospel " spoken of in the Apocalypse, 
transcending the existing Gospel as the spirit does 
the letter, and destined to supersede it, according to 
the Apostolic dictum (1 Cor. xiii. 9), "When that 
which is perfect is come, then that which is in part 
shall be done away." The final consummation was 
to occur in the year 1260, and^to be accomplished by 
monks, as the true " spirituales " or spiritual men, 
new orders of whom would appear in the latter days, 
one after the pattern of Moses, the other like Elias. 

Similar opinions were uttered shortly afterwards 
by Amaury of Bene, a village near Chartres, from 
whom, in connection with speculative views as to 
the unity and universality of spiritual life, they are 
supposed to have been inherited by the so-called 



38 



The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



" Brethren of the Free Spirit." But what we are here 
immediately called on to consider is the remarkable 
exactness with which these vaticinations of Joachim 
were soon afterwards fulfilled in the two Mendicant 
Orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans ; and the 
coincidence can only be accounted for on the assump- 
tion, sufficiently indeed warranted by the event, that 
there really existed at the time a widely felt want* 
in two directions, which these two Orders were well 
calculated to satisfy. Both of them were based on 
the principle of reform, both on the novel idea of 
substituting for the merely ascetical routine of a 
retired life — one of active missionary exertion among 
the people ; both were calculated to act defensively 
against the formidable opposition of the Cathari and 
Waldenses ; but while the staid and haughty 
Dominicans opposed innovation rather by vigilant 
supervision and an austere example, the more sympa- 
thising and enthusiastic Franciscans, appropriating to 
themselves all that was most attractive and influential 
among the Waldenses, ingratiated themselves readily 
and intimately with popular feeling, encouraging 
piety rather than repressing error, and in other 
respects faithfully upholding the character of Chris- 
tian Missionaries, t 

But it was the Church itself which really most 

* So Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Leibnitz, Mirabeau, and 
Arthur Young, predicted the French Revolution. 

t It was the striking resemblance of the character of St Francis to that 
of Christ in several essential particulars which, admiringly dwelt upon by 
his followers, eventually produced the curious legend of the Stigmata. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



39 



needed reform, and there was a constant tendency in 
reform when zealously and faithfully pursued to 
transcend Church limits. To go this length was diffi- 
cult for an Order so intimately connected with the 
establishment, and who were indebted in great mea- 
sure for their sudden successes to Church authoriza- 
tion. But the Franciscans became divided into two 
factions, a lax and a rigid party ; and the Popes, na- 
turally favouring the former, as least suggesting an 
invidious contrast to their own self-indulgence, in- 
curred the enmity and opposition of the others. 
These, calling themselves (emphatically " spirituales," 
spiritual men) and mingling their mystical devo- 
tion for St Francis with the prophetical lucubrations 
of Joachim, turned both into an attack upon the 
Papacy. Their hostile attitude was prominently ex- 
pressed in a book entitled " Introduction to the 
Eternal Gospel," which in the year 1254 the Bishop 
of Paris accused before the Roman Court. Its pur- 
port, — namely that the Gospel of Christ was obsolete 
in its actual form, and to be superseded by an eternal 
Gospel — was no more than had been said by Joachim 
already ; but here the inferences derogatory to Rome 
as a carnal, not a spiritual institution, were more 
clearly and defiantly expressed. Still severer remarks 
were contained in a Commentary on Revelations by 
Peter John Olivi, General of the schismatical Fran- 
ciscans about a. p. 1280, who seems to have been the 
first to identify the Roman Church with the great 
whore of the Apocalypse. 



40 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



THE REFORMATION. 

The Ghibelline Dante renewed the claim of reform 
in the sense of Arnold of Brescia, namely, to the 
effect that Csesar should assert and retain his own, 
and the clergy be limited to their proper province 
of spiritual ministration. Generally speaking, how- 
ever, it became more and more clear that reform 
meant hostility to the church, and that it must stand 
aloof altogether from the church in order to be suc- 
cessful. This was signally manifested by the ineffec- 
tual efforts to effect internal reform made by the 
great councils in the first half of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The improvement, if to be had at all, was 
evidently not to come from this quarter. Still the 
revolt of Luther was a step which, in spite of the in- 
dulgence scandal, the climax of many centuries of 
misrule tending to pervert the moral sentiments, a 
large part of Europe was unable to follow. Even 
Luther and most of his fellow reformers were but 
partially emancipated ; they renounced external sub- 
mission to a discredited authority, yet retained many 
of the appurtenances of that authority, and indeed 
were encouraged to go the length they did only 
through reliance on what had formed an important 
part of its ostensible credentials, and by setting up 
the Bible against the Church. 

Hitherto the Bible had been summarily appealed 
to on matters of controversy without any critical 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



4* 



misgiving. Though jealously regarded by its eccle- 
siastical parent in times of threatened heresy, it had 
always maintained its place as undoubted authority, 
and was quoted by the Waldenses and by Innocent 
the Third in opposite senses with equal confidence. 
Luther therefore did not abandon the general posi- 
tion of the Roman Church by merely protesting on 
Biblical grounds against practical abuses ; and the 
Reformation had a great immediate advantage in 
being so far able to build on the old foundations. 
But the advantage w r as a doubtful one, and the whole 
question of supremacy on religious matters was vir- 
tually undergoing a revolution. The more influential 
Reformers professed indeed to take the Bible, not as 
transmitted to them by authority, but as carrying its 
own evidence through the " Testimonium Spiritus," 
or witness of the Holy Spirit. But many causes pre- 
vented the full import of this assumption from being 
immediately seen. The general spirit of the Renais- 
sance, which w T as not origination but restoration, 
the dangerously fanatical pretensions of extreme 
parties, and the paltry results produced by the prin- 
ciple of progress, as hitherto exemplified by church 
" development," — all tended to discourage an avowed 
reliance on the inward witness, and to induce men to 
look for extrinsic support in traditional resources of 
the past. Yet Luther ventured on grounds of what 
was really mere individual and sentimental prefer- 
ence, to discriminate arbitrarily between the relative 
claims of the several Scripture books, and to select 
some as having a decided pre-eminence over others. 



42 The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



And this freedom was more amply and systemati- 
cally used by his eminent cotemporary Zwingli. To 
an eye absorbed in contemplation of God, like 
that of the philosophical Swiss Reformer, all other 
things, the varied media of revelation, and even the 
form of Christianity itself, would appear relative and 
subordinate. But the resolute adoption of such a 
theory would have led at once to the dangerous origi- 
nality and anarchical assumptions of the Anabaptists ; 
and hence Zwingli too made the " written word " pro- 
fessedly his anchorage. And yet highly as he valued 
the Bible, as the best among many means by which 
faith could be initiated and sustained, he still treated 
it as an instrument to be discretionally used, not as a 
dictation to be submitted to. Doubtless it contained 
a spiritual element, but its action upon man's spiri- 
tual life was neither inevitable nor indispensable ; the 
central all-originating power was the faculty imme- 
diately derived from God, who though occasionally 
employing Scripture as a mode of kindling the in- 
ternal light, might yet if he chose effect his object 
without it. In this view the external word appeared 
as a sort of raw nutriment whose beneficial essence 
had to be extracted and assimilated ; and Zwingli 
was thus among the first to revive the right of criti- 
cism already asserted by the early Fathers, and to 
distinguish between Scripture in the mass and the 
" Word of God " contained in it. He cared little 
about canonicity and authenticity ; he inferred divi- 
nity from goodness, not goodness from some arbitrary 
standard or assumption of divinity. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



43 



SPINOZA AND THE DEISTS. 

At length the free claim of reason as ultimate cri- 
terium in religious matters, — in Zwingli and others 
partially veiled by Scripture forms and language, was 
presented to the world in clear and simple terms by 
the Deists and by Spinoza. It was in fact nothing 
more than the original Protestant claim of the " tes- 
timonium spiritus " relieved from fanatical self-con- 
ceit and exaggeration. Estranged from the service 
of theology since the rise of Nominalism, — that na- 
tural and ultimate form of dogmatical theology which 
contented itself with asserting what it no longer 
attempted to prove, — reason, — after those preliminary 
triumphs in literature and science which corrected 
the theory of the universe, and ended the ecclesiasti- 
cal monopoly of culture, — at length ventured to assert 
itself also in religion, on the simple ground taken by 
the Cartesians and Locke, that submission to an 
external authority naturally implies a preliminary 
appeal to an internal adjudication. For how can we 
know there is a God at all, or presume to recognize 
as true what is offered to us for acceptance as his 
Word, unless by a previous exercise of our own natural 
faculties ? It was on this ground that Locke com- 
pared the affectation of relying on revelation inde- 
pendently of reason to a blind man trying to use a 
telescope; and Collins, in his ' Essay on Free thinking,' 
showed at length how free inquiry is the only means 



44 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



of attaining truth, and, moreover, a right dangerous to 
suppress, one which is allowed and even commanded 
by the Bible. Henceforth revelation had to submit to 
rational examination ; and hence that right of free 
criticism, which has more and more encroached upon 
traditional theology in modern days, until at last 
reason claims to occupy the ground alone, as itself 
constituting a natural revelation superseding the 
former artificial one. 

Reason's first task was to assert itself and its own 
freedom, to ascertain the extent and value of its re- 
sources ; its next to apply the acquired freedom use- 
fully and effectually in exposing falsehood and dis- 
covering the various forms of truth. The two aims 
are closely connected, and both were unflinchingly 
pursued by the Deists ; although from the simplicity 
of the truths asserted and the comparatively large 
proportion of unexplained error at first hastily cast 
aside, as, for instance, by Lord Herbert of Cherbuiy, 
their results now seem to have been chiefly negative. 
Yet the negative was based on a previous affirmation 
of those plain convictions of natural religion which 
are virtually the same in Lord Herbert's five proposi- 
tions as in Kant's three. Spinoza's system, too, is 
built on the avowal of that central unity which is 
the basis of all philosophy and religion. In its details, 
however, the latter may be described as an elaborate 
vindication of individual freedom in various spheres ; 
first outwardly, as a right obtainable only through 
rational government ; next internally, as a quality 
incompatible with superstition, and the undue sway 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



of passion and affection in individual souls. Here 
the current of free thought seems at first sight inter- 
rupted by political theories such as that of Hobbes, 
advocating despotic government and arbitrary reli- 
gion ; reversing, indeed, Lord Herbert's vindication 
of the rights of conscience against establishment by 
setting up establishment against conscience. Yet, 
though deviating from the previous line of argu- 
ment, they are but a one-sided assertion of one of 
the essential elements of Protestantism — namely, 
the Reformation of Henry VIII., — the principle 
of national supremacy, the anticipation of the liber- 
ation of individual consciences by a preliminary 
vindication of the national conscience in the form 
of a strong government, — against the dangers 
of democratic anarchy, and the premature develop- 
ment of an untutored individualism. For, indeed, a 
wide area of knowledge as well as of freedom still 
remained to be won, and the shortcomings of the 
previous Reformation had begun at the time to be 
very painfully felt, especially in the arrogant and 
ignorant dogmatism which had rallied round the 
Bible. And hence the first task of an honest and 
fearless thinker was to point out the boundaries of 
truth and falsehood in regard to this vital matter ; * 
to show that the Bible presents no absolute limit to 
the human mind ; that what is ignorantly worshipped 
in it is often what is least valuable, sometimes 
altogether beside the real purpose ; that its really 



* See Spinoza's ' Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ' of which a translation 
has been recently published by Triibner and Co. 



46 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



essential contents, apart from fanciful and casual ac- 
cessories are nothing but natural morality, the simple 
lesson of justice and charity. This lesson could, of 
course, be learnt without the Bible almost as well as 
with it ; better indeed if a senseless idolatry of the 
letter was to supersede its legitimate use ; and thus 
the Reformation obtained for the first time a clear 
formula for working out its independence. 



DISCUSSION OF THE PROBLEM OF BIBLICAL REVELATION. 

The problem here mooted was far more difficult 
and complicated than than that of the Old Refor- 
mation. It is characteristic of all reforms to link 
projected alterations as much as possible with old 
associations, changes being hard in proportion to the 
threatened interruption of mental continuity. Most- 
difficult is the attempt to effect a wholesale displace- 
ment of the idolatry of past ages ; to set aside the 
last stay of religious supernaturalism in favour of a 
simple appeal to conscience and reason ; and no less 
than this was the issue in the arena of Protestant- 
controversy when the Bible itself, to which in its 
infancy the Reformation had confidently clung as its 
main support, began to be called in question. So 
great a change could only be effected gradually ; and 
yet, in the first step, the first admission of actual 
error in sacred books, the entire revolutionary postu- 
late was virtually conceded. This was sufficiently 
clear to men who, like Lord Herbert and Locke, 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 47 



looked to the fundamental conditions of knowledge 
and religion, and also to dogmatists like Quenstedt, 
who foresaw with alarm that the admission of error 
in a single Scripture verse would give an entrance to 
Satan which would jeopardize the whole. But the 
general mind had to travel through many stages of 
negation and decomposition before it could reach the 
same conclusion. It had to admit, first, the varieties 
of readings and textual error ; then the fact of im- 
portant variations and contradictions in the sense ; 
then proofs of Scripture disagreement with the infer- 
ences of astronomy and other sciences ; then to 
consider accurately what is meant by inspiration and 
revelation, and how far they are really compatible 
with man's moral and intellectual nature ; above 
all, to scan the sacred volume with impartiality, 
and candidly to admit, when fairly proved, the 
existence in its pages of those outrages on consistency 
and morality which no ostensible revelation can with 
impunity defy. At the period here under review — 
namely, the seventeenth century, the belief in miracle, 
the wider postulate including that of inspiration, was 
only slowly giving way before the advance of science, 
so that rectification of texts and elimination of indif- 
ferent, untrue, or contradictory matters in the Bible 
went on for some time without obviously trenching 
on the idea of a revelation, allowance being made 
for degrees and limits of inspiration, and partial 
rectification being regarded as restoration. The 
veto in religious matters first seriously uttered by 
Socinianism was feeble and irresolute, professedly 



48 The Eternal Gospel ; or y the 



distinguishing between things above reason and those 
against it, yet unable to draw any sure line of 
demarcation between them. And the appeal made 
by Socinianism to Biblical revelation, in proof of 
what it accepted as supernatural, only showed by 
strained and unnatural interpretations its latent dis- 
trust in the reliability of the assumed test, which 
was thus served much as certain nations treat their 
gods, alternately flogged and adored by their 
superstitious caprices. When, however, Lord Her- 
bert had denounced the corruptions of established 
religions on the basis of religious reason, and 
the supremacy of the inward light or criterium, dis- 
allowed by Hobbes only on political grounds, had 
been still more emphatically asserted by Locke, the 
next form assumed by Deistic argument, was an en- 
deavour to show the impossibility of there being any 
thing really mysterious, any thing either above reason 
or against it, in the Christian revelation. For if, as 
already assumed by the above mentioned writers, 
reason be the sole ultimate test and interpreter of 
truth, it is obvious that, except in that absolute sense 
in which all things are mysteries, there can be 
nothing in a true revelation, such as Christianity 
must be taken to be, really transcending reason or 
properly mysterious. This was the thesis maintained 
by Toland. who corroborated the inference by show- 
ing that what are called " mysteries " in the New 
Testament are only relatively so — L e., things tempo- 
rarily or locally concealed under the veil of type or 
ceremony, and which, Christ having removed the 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



veil, are mysteries no longer. The argument, how- 
ever, was obviously insufficient, for it did not follow 
because true religion must be assumed to be reason- 
able, or because the New Testament writers use the 
word mystery only in a relative sense, that therefore 
all the contents of the New Testament must be rea- 
sonable. On the contrary, the truest view of the 
matter, and also the. most direct way of effecting a 
return to rational religion, was to displace supersti- 
tious belief by negatively showing that much of the 
New Testament is, in fact, unreasonable ; by exhibiting 
in detail the mixed quality of its claims and the 
questionable nature of its multifarious ingredients, 
and then carefully sifting the essentials from irrelevant 
and spurious accessories. Toland — in addition to his 
above-mentioned general thesis, which, however true 
of real revelation, or revelation in the abstract, is by 
no means so of its concrete Biblical form — continued 
the sifting process already begun by Lord Herbert 
in several free criticisms of the New Testament,, 
these being useful historical exposures of some of 
its misrepresentations and corruptions, in some 
measure anticipating what has been more fully 
accomplished in later times. The strength of 
Deism, however, was not so much shown in its 
historical criticism as in its energetic protests against 
everything bearing the name of religion which was 
plainly offensive to conscience aud common sense. 
Such protests are naturally disliked by politicians, 
and hence, in great measure, the vehement denunci- 
ation of the materialist Charles Blount by Macaulay 

E 



50 The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



in his ' History of England.' Of similar kind was 
the undertaking of Chubb, a working man of Salis- 
bury, to show, in an Essay published in 1739, that 
Christianity is not a doctrine, but a life ; that the 
true Gospel is not a narrative of events, but a moral 
lesson guiding men in the way of happiness ; the 
means employed being certain plain rules or maxims 
of conduct addressed to the inward agency of faith, 
which adopts these rules as directing principles ; 
rules which, as addressed to the poor and simple, 
are necessarily of the simplest kind, consisting, 
indeed, in nothing more than the lesson of love 
to God and man. Morgan's defence of St Paul's 
position, as that of true Christianity, against the 
Judaical religion of the Old Testament and its God, 
has won for him the name of the modern Marcion ; 
and his accusation of Mosaical religion as essen- 
tially deficient in omitting a system of future rewards 
and punishments occasioned the singular argument 
of Warburton, insisting that on account of this very 
deficiency it must be taken to have been miraculous 
and divine. At length the question of miracle, 
hitherto only hastily and irresolutely alluded to,* 
assumed a foremost place in English controversy 
in Woolston's exposure of the specific improbability 
of the New Testament miracles, and also in Annet's 
reply to Jackson, showing the inadequacy of relative 

* Chubb disavowed miracles as essential to the Gospel, but declined 
pronouncing on their general credibility. Blount plainly avowed his 
disbelief ; but Toland was a supernatural rationalist, with no essential 
antipathy to miracle, only it must be sufficiently proved, and resorted to 
only on grave and rare occasions. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



5 1 



miracles, i.e., miracles considered merely as things 
unusual within the compass of the laws of nature, — 
to prove the supernatural things in evidence of which 
they were quoted. Annet here partially adopted the 
absolute position of Spinoza in reference to miracle — - 
namely, that the laws of nature, considered as the 
laws or will of God, must be unchangeable like him- 
self, and that therefore miracles could have no 
existence except as human fancies ; generally, how- 
ever, the Deists treat miracles in a relative sense, as 
things not against nature, but above it,* or as 
extraordinary occurrences requiring extraordinary 
proofs ; thus leading on to the final argument of 
Hume, based on the generally precarious nature of 
testimony as compared with the uniformly consistent 
experience of nature's order, — namely, that such 
proof is not to be had, it being ever less likely that 
nature should change than that testimony should be 
mistaken. 



DISPLACEMENT OF OUTWARD BY LNWAKD CRITERIA. 

The external defences of revelation, in the usual 
meaning of the term, having given way, it remained 
to be seen how far the hypothesis could be main- 
tained on other grounds, or how the want of it was 
to be replaced. And here it was at once seen that 
whatever else might be said upon the subject, the 

* This sophistical equivocation had been already sufficiently met by 
Spinoza (Tract, Theol. Polit. vi., sect, 27) and Bayle— ' Reponses aux 
Questions d'un Provincial,' 2nd P., 159, p. 833. 

E 2 



52 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



very fact of revelation having to plead its cause defer- 
entially before the tribunal of reason, implied an 
admission of the paramount authority of the latter, 
leaving to its rival the right to be called divine only 
in the general sense in which everything true and 
good is so. Then began an earnest and general 
employment of the winnowing process separating 
essentials from non-essentials ; and it was mere 
weakness or affectation to pretend to take those 
essentials as outwardly revealed, when in fact 
owing their continuing currency and power solely 
to reason's internal approval. Hence the incon- 
sistency of the position of Semler, who as theolo- 
gical professor towards the close of the eighteenth 
century at Halle, assumed the right to separate 
the divine wheat or "word" in Scripture from 
the human chaff on the basis of moral insight, while 
still claiming to rely on an external revelation. 
And the same inconsistent if not hypocritical pre- 
tence is often resorted to in our own day, affecting to 
owe to the Bible, as sole indispensable standard of 
true belief, those very inferences whose validity really 
depends only on the sanction of our own minds ; thus 
conveniently screening from public view the great 
change displacing the external criterium in favour of 
the internal, and which, giving free range to private 
judgment, leaves to us only the duty of making that 
judgment as reliable and perfect as possible. 

One of the desiderata for effecting this purpose was to 
account satisfactorily for the large admixture of what 
Luther had already denominated "chaff" with the 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



53 



better essence of Scripture ; another was to explain the 
true nature of the latter, and the exact nature and limits 
of its continuing right to bind reason and conscience. 
Both branches of inquiry are nearly connected, but 
the second was the more immediately pressing of the 
two, the most needed in order to tranquillize con- 
science, and therefore the first to reach what may be 
called a satisfactory issue. On the basis of the ana- 
lysis of religious data already made, the axiom as- 
sumed by Deism at its outset — namety, the identity of 
true Christianity with natural religion — was formally 
reasserted by Tindal in his work, 6 Christianity as old 
as the Creation,' in which he showed natural religion 
to be the only religion ; anticipating Kant in desig- 
nating the assumed distinction between religion and 
morality as merely formal and verbal ; one being right 
action as prescribed by reason and nature, the other 
the same action considered as divinely commanded. 
The condemnation implied in the above axiom obvi- 
ously covers a wider area than the approval ; yet 
Tindal protests against being thought an infidel, his 
argument recognizing Christianity as essentially true. 
Something more than this is implied by Lord Shaftes- 
bury, who freely, though cautiously, criticises not only 
those established corruptions of Christianity which 
he humorously compares to heraldic monstrosities, 
but even Christianity itself, censuring it as too mer- 
cenary, and also too " abstract," as looking to future 
indemnities and rewards, and standing too rigidly 
.and ascetically aloof from common duties of life. In 
regard to specifically Protestant delusions, he remarks 



54 Tlie Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



that of all nations, the Mahommedans alone had been 
led by a general ignorance of literature to place 
all their reliance on a book, neither ancient nor 
modern Rome having committed itself to this folly ; 
and he adds his conviction that the best Protestant 
divines were beginning to show their recognition of 
the error by appealing to evidences, and by acknow- 
ledging that spirit alone must judge the productions 
of the spirit. (See ' Miscellanies/ 5, ch. 1.) And, in- 
deed, the tendency which here reaches its climax, 
namely, to substitute internal for external standards, 
morality for conventional theology, was the same 
which from the earliest times had pervaded the con- 
troversy with dogmatism ; Shaftesbury being in this 
respect the legitimate successor not only of Lord 
Herbert, but of Cudworth and Grotius, and indeed of 
the best philosophy and religion of modern times ; 
for the Deistic appeal to conscience and common sense 
was but a mere prosaical repetition of the convictions 
of the old Reformers, the mediaeval mystics, and even 
the Troubadour and Minnesinger poets. The effects 
of the mental revolution may be recognized not only 
in German theologians, but in many of the profounder 
English divines of the eighteenth century, as, for in- 
stance in TVollaston and Clarke, who without distinctly 
repudiating orthodoxy, nevertheless abundantly ex- 
emplify the great revolution that was at the time 
changing the centre of religious life ; a change tacitly 
betrayed by many of these writers, as formerly by 
Grotius, in the admission that God commands what is 
good because it is good, and that morality would still be 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



binding even were God non-existent. The convictions 
of Butler, the author of the • Analogy,' are best seen in 
his moral discourses, in which he insists on man's in- 
trinsically moral nature, as laying him, considered 
alone and in himself, under the strictest obligations 
to virtue. Conyers Middleton, who in a letter to Water- 
land suggested the line of argument in reply to Tindal 
subsequently adopted by Butler, affected to defend 
revelation while openly renouncing its external 
bulwarks of miracle, the liberal accuracy of Scrip- 
ture, &c, and was, therefore, naturally felt by 
orthodoxy to be a dangerous champion. Here di- 
verge the two theories of man* the one making 
him an immoral force, inherited from Machiavelli 
and the Jesuits by Hobbes, Mandeville, La Roche- 
foucauld, and political economy ; the other, considering 
him as essentially and naturally moral, transmitted 
from the mediaeval mysticsf to Zwingli, Picus of 
Mirandola, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson, 
Herder, and Kant. And to this altered theory of 

* La Bruyere describes men as little better than animals ; he says : 
"You are surprised when they turn their faces to see the human form." 
On the other hand, "No one," says Spinoza, "can so far abdicate his 
rights as to cease to be man ; he may resign the right to act, but not that 
of thinking and judging. The aim of the State is not to transform men 
into beasts or machines, but to enable them to use their faculties in se- 
curity ; the true end of government, therefore, is liberty." (Theol. Pol. 
ch. xx.) 

t Instances may be quoted from the conveniently terse language of 
Angelus Silesius : 

Dass Gott so selig ist, und lebet ohn' Verlangen, 
Hat er sowohl von mir als ich von ihm empfangen. 
Ich trage Gottes Bild; wenn er sich will beseh'n, 
So kann es nur in mir, und wer mir gleicht, gescheh'n. 



56 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



man corresponds an altered view of God, displacing 
gradually, if not openly disavowing the Deistic God, 
considered as a Being transcendantly above the 
world, or, indeed, entirely separated and removed 
from it in consequence of the disruption of the link 
of miracle. It was under these circumstances that 
there occurred the momentous change restoring to 
the seemingly deserted world its faith in a nearly 
and intimately present God, and that what, in the best 
sense of the word, has been called " Romanticism/ ' 
reopened the true sources of religion in nature and 
the human soul. Many different though nearly-allied 
meanings have been attached to this term, such as 
the free originality and enthusiasm of the Teutonic 
races, the spirit of adventure which brought home a 
new European life from the grave of the Founder 
of Christianity, or else the modern reaction against 
an effete and merely formal classicism, or perhaps 
only a frivolous sentimentality, a fantastic revival of 
mediaeval ideas and usages. The revolution here 
meant is of a different sort ; it is that which, towards 
the close of the last century, emancipated modern 
thought from conventional trammels and a mechanical 
philosophy by a return to living nature ; the idealism 
recognizing a divine presence everywhere, but especi- 
ally and primarily in the human soul. The various 
theories of law and morals set up by modern thought 
in opposition to those of the one-sided advocates of 
artificial establishment, the theories of sympathy, of 
benevolence, of social instinct, of the moral sense, 
&c, may be considered as so many forms of partial 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 57 



approximation to the full measure of emancipation in 
the ultimate recognition of the bases of religion itself 
in a higher estimate of human nature. It was in 
view of a consummation of this kind that Lessing, 
after the manner of St Paul, ventured to treat Biblical 
revelation as a provisional education leading to some- 
thing higher and better, namely, to a religion of 
reason and disinterested love of virtue. " Shall it 
be said," he says, " that there is an end or purpose 
in the education of individuals and none in that of 
the race ; that nature fails where man succeeds ? 
Calumny, calumny ! No ! It will assuredly come, 
a time when man, feeling more and more assured as 
to the general perspective of his destiny, shall no 
longer borrow from futurity the principle of his 
actions ; when he will do right because it is right, 
not because of rewards arbitrarily held out to bribe 
his integrity ; rewards whose sole real use is only to 
confirm his first unsteady steps, and to make him 
acquainted with the better and surer rewards to be 
found within his own soul. It will assuredly come, 
that " Eternal Gospel " announced in the New Tes- 
tament and foreseen by the spiritualists of the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who erred solely 
in too sanguinely anticipating its speedy and imme- 
diate advent." 

" March on," he continues, " eternal Providence " 
with imperceptible step ; only let not the impercep- 
tibility lead me to despair ; let me not despair even 
when thy course seems reactionary and regressive ; 
the shortest path is not always the most reliable and 
direct." 



58 7 he Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



fichte's critique of revelation. 

It was at this point in the history of development 
that Lessing uttered his solemn farewell to orthodoxy, 
and that Kant's " Categorical Imperative," the 
corollary of a long antecedent conrse of elimination 
and affirmation, consummated the moral revolution 
long before begun by Spinoza, definitively placing 
morality above theology, and representing duty as 
the form or feeling in which the law of perfect reason 
is most authoritatively brought home to finite beings. 
The general aim and spirit of the Reformation here 
won their accomplishment in the souls complete self- 
recovery and bold proclamation of its freedom ; but 
the value of the achievement consisted more especially 
in the comprehensive and reverential feeling accom- 
panying the better phases of its modern triumph — 
namely, where, as in the instance of Kant, asserting 
freedom, not in the sense of vague independence and 
abstract individual right, but the rights of man con- 
sidered as a member of a moral order, in which right 
is only the correlative of duty. From this point in 
its career the human mind looked critically back 
with greater confidence and accuracy to the past, 
many historical problems were more thoroughly in- 
vestigated, and in particular the theory as well as 
the fact of supernatural revelation underwent a 
thorough scrutiny. And the result not only showed 
the essentially misleading texture of the given reve- 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 59 



lation, and that the word itself, as understood in 
antiquity, by no means really implied the suspension 
or subversion of human means and faculties now sig- 
nified by it, but also that, in the last-mentioned sense 
it is quite inadmissible, being compatible neither 
with the unchangeable nature of God nor with the 
finite capacity and moral nature of man. For, how- 
ever supernatural in its origin, the revelation needs 
natural instruments and organs for its introduction 
and communication, in order to reach the faculties of 
its human recipients ; and this inevitable mode of its 
transmission must affect its absolute purity. To ob- 
tain credence and to be of use it must be suited to 
human capacities at the time, and hence it cannot at 
any one time be perfect and final ; for this would 
imply cotemporaneous perfection in the recipient, 
and indeed the formation of a barrier to his future 
progress in the way of using the knowledge so 
acquired for the attainment of higher knowledge. 
And human nature being essentially progressive, any- 
thing so implying fixity and finality is in itself con- 
tradictory and unsuited to it. Lessing, following the 
idea of the Arminians and Socinians, described reve- 
lation as a sort of school primer, a rudimentary 
education of humanity ; giving nothing which might 
not have been attained naturally, but giving it sooner 
and earlier. He compared it to the calculated result 
placed by the master before his pupils in order to 
assist and direct their first imperfect efforts ; but 
then, just as pupils altogether depending on an arti- 
ficial help of this kind never learn arithmetic, so the 



Go The Eternal Gospel ; cr, the 



soul which leans on external revelation as its sole 
support, can never become really and truly moral. 
For morality is the maturity of the will qualifying a 
man for self-control, and ending the state of elemen- 
tary pupilage by transferring the entire direction 
and responsibility of his acts into his own hands. 
A supernatural dictation to the will ■ destroys real 
morality, by superseding freedom and responsibility, 
and therefore, argues Fichte, no such dictation can 
be really divine. But it is quite conceivable and 
possible that human nature may have become so 
degenerate and weak as to be provisionally incapable 
of self-regulation by an independent recognition and 
voluntary adoption of the moral law, in which 
case a lower class of motives must needs be 
appealed to ; and then it may certainly be said 
that a system addressing such motives is divinely 
authorized. Different states of culture require dif- 
ferent styles of address and modes of treatment. 
The sensual need a sensual and palpable discipline ; 
the restraints of a positive rule or law based on 
adequate authority, which may be fairly represented 
as the authority of God. And Fichte in his critique 
of revelation fully allows that God may really be 
supposed to sanction a religion or system of law so 
externally established, provided it be really conducive 
to moral purposes. But the provisional sanction 
assumed in such a case is very different from the 
eternal seal of divine veracity imagined by theologians; 
and to assert the relative truth of a certain form of 
religion is almost the same thing as denying its 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 61 



absolute truth and admitting its human character. 
" The necessity of a positive religion," says Lessing,* 
" by which natural religion is modified according to 
the requisitions of specific times and places, I call 
its inner truth ; " but this is only relative truth, 
i. g., truth in the sense of a provisional adapta- 
tion to circumstances, which, although in a sense 
ascribable to God, is not so in the sense usually 
pleaded for of direct supernatural agency. For when 
we lower the claim of revelation from absolute to 
relative, it becomes impossible to prove that the 
limited accession of knowledge implied in the hypo- 
thesis could not have been acquired naturally, 
especially after the evidence already given from the 
very nature of those rational faculties on which 
we must rely in the last resort, that a real revela- 
tion can contain nothing absolutely transcending 
them. And when Lessing proceeds to say that 
while all positive or revealed religion contains a 
mixture of true and false, that the form of it 
making the fewest additions to natural religion is 
the best, natural religion becomes the admitted 
equivalent of true religion, and all religion becomes 
improvable by re-adjustment to natural standards, 
understanding by the term " natural " not only the 
best of what human nature has produced, but what 
it may yet be capable of producing in the course 
of its future progress. Such a progress being 
recognized as possible and desirable in several 
passages of the New Testament, was also admitted 
* Works, Vol. XI., Part II., p. 247. 



62 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



in a certain sense as above stated by the Catholic 
Church ; but here the progress was subjected to 
special conditions and limitations which thwarted 
and perverted it. The failure of Church instru- 
mentality to produce within the limits of its 
own peculiar forms a real improvement led the 
Protestant Reformers to think that the only prac- 
ticable improvement was restoration, a return to the 
literal types of Bible Christianity. But the Bible 
letter proved to be a barrier in many respects more 
noxious than that of the Church ; its yoke was more 
subtle than the other, because the book, by becoming 
intimately associated and incorporated with the con- 
ceptions and feelings of individual minds, made each 
perplexed but believing Biblicist a subtle inquisitor 
and tyrant to himself. At last this self-imposed 
refinement of slavery was itself attacked and repelled 
by human reason, elated and invigorated as it was 
with so many recent triumphs in science, religion, 
and literature ; and so, when the Deistic refutations 
of Scriptural revelation had been recapitulated 
by Reimarus, Lessing declared the New Testa- 
ment, as well as the Old to be a mere primer or 
rudimentary school-book leading on to a religion of 
reason: to "the religion of Christ" as he called it, 
in contradistinction to the " Christian religion ; " 
a religion striving to appropriate Christ's senti- 
ments and character instead of idly following or 
worshipping his person.* Ammonf considered the 

* 'Die Eeligion Christi. — Works, Vol. XL, Part II., p. 212. 
t 1 Die Fortbildung des Christenthums,' Vol. I. p. viii. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 63 



solution of the problem of perfectibility which is still 
before ns, to consist in eliminating more and more 
the true ideal meaning of Christianity from obsolete 
historical forms ; and assuredly, whether with Kant 
and Fichte we look to the essential conditions of 
moral life, or review historically the tendencies of 
religious thought since the time of the Reformation, 
there can be little doubt that whatever the more imme- 
diately prominent features of the coming change, its 
general and ultimate aim must be to simplify and 
purify, to cultivate the moral reason with reverential 
assiduity, to re-establish the true law as a principle 
within the soul in the first instance, and then as a 
code of instructions susceptible of indefinite enlarge- 
ment, and an ever closer and more perfect verifica- 
tion. 



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THE ETERNAL GOSPEL; 



THE IDEA OF 
CHRISTIAN PERFECTIBILITY. 



By R. W. MAC KAY, MA., 



Author of * TJie Progress of the Intellect,' *A Sketch of the History of 
Christianity ',' * TJie Tubingen School and its Antecedents,' &c. <bc. &c. 



O' iaoi6ti\S) <pi\ia, crvfjL<t><ai'ia rtp KaAcp \6y(p* 
w Resemblance, love, and harmony with the beauty of reason." 

Plato, Polit. 3, 401. 

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 

14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, AND 
20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH ; 
AND 



OR, 



A TRACT, IN TWO PARTS. 




PART II. 



THOMAS SCOTT, 



MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE. 
1866. 

[Price One Shilling each Part} 



A law of order reigns 
Throughout creation, and this law it is 
Which like to God the universe maintains. 
Herein do higher creatures see displayed 

The trace of the eternal Might 

All natures to this heavenly law incline, 
Approaching each, according to his kind, 
Some more, some less, unto their source divine. 

Dante, Paradiso, Canto 1, Wright's Translation. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Section 1.— The Moral Problem— Character and Motive 1 

„ 2. — Freedom and Moral Training 6 

„ 3.— -On Utilitarianism - - - 13 

„ 4. — Comparison with other Systems - -24 

„ 5. — Redemption - - - - 29 

„ 6. — Regeneration - - - 33 

„ 7. — Relation of the Divine and Human Agencies 41 

„ 8.— The Spirit of Nature - - - 48 

„ 9.— The Individual Spirit - - - 64 

„ 10. — The Self-refutation of Materialism - - 70 

„ 11.— The Unity of Spiritual Life - -77 

„ 12.— The Nature of Freedom - - 90 

„ 13.— The Law of Liberty - - - 102 

„ 14. — Christian Morality (so styled) - - 117 

„ 15.— Moral Maxims - - - 123 

„ 16.— The Moral Ideas - - - 130 



THE ETERNAL GOSPEL; 

on, 

THE IDEA OF 

CHRISTIAN PERFECTIBILITY. 



THE MORAL PROBLEM — CHARACTER AXD MOTIVE. 

THE former part of this tract was an attempt to trace 
the circumstances which caused the estrangement 
of religion from morality in the Christian Church with 
its consequent corruptions, and then briefly to sug- 
gest how experience of these corruptions, as exempli- 
fied in ecclesiastical practice, emboldened the free 
spirit of modern Europe to initiate a series of efforts 
for their reunion, such efforts necessarily taking the 
form of hostility to the Church. After long contro- 
versy (and it seems to be only through protracted 
efforts that any unusual truth, however, in itself clear 
and simple, can penetrate the tough hide of human 
perversity), Kant first* won respectful attention for 

* It should not, however, be forgotten that earlier advocates of the same 
doctrine, such as Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, had already addressed 
unwilling ears in more perilous times. 

B 



2 



The Eternal Gospel; cr> the 



the axiom that religion rests on morality, not morality 
on religion ; that the latter mnst look for its primary 
revelations to man's sonl ; and that instead of deriving 
the notion of duty from supposed divine commands, 
we must infer a divine command from internal con- 
viction of a duty. Kant's system is, in a word, a reso- 
lute faith in human nature ; a faith which, fully 
admitting all that had been urged by Berkeley and 
Hume in disparagement of the reliability of know- 
ledge considered as a product of sensation, finds 
compensation in the internal resources of the soul, 
especially its moral instincts and capacities. The 
whole tendency of modern thought, — where honestly 
and freely exercised, — led to this issue ; through 
many negations and affirmations its avowed or un- 
conscious aim was to discover a system of morals 
which should have the vitality and power of religion ; 
not a mere feeble makeshift of common-sense pro- 
priety and expediency, but a life ordered by rules 
exercising legitimate and absolute authority over the 
emancipated reason. For the solution of this problem 
it was necessary to go back to the original fountains 
of obligation ; to study the nature of good and ill 
not in traditional formularies, or in the merely empi- 
rical relations of the outward world, but in the moral 
capacities of man and the mysterious relations of the 
soul ; in spite of the perplexities occasioned by con- 
flicting systems of psychology, whose variances show 
how far the problem of self-knowledge originally 
proposed by Socrates, still continues short of a 
satisfactory solution. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 3 



Now in things blindly moved by external neces- 
sity there can of course be no morality at all. 
Neither is it found in those lower spheres of life 
where, although the necessity be internal, its 
working is in the form of .instinct as if externally 
directed without any seeming consciousness in the 
immediate agent ; moral agency first appears where 
external impulse is consciously responded to after 
being submitted to the revision of intelligence, where 
the internal power assumes the form of conscious 
purpose or deliberate will. It is then seen in the 
active relations of persons to things and to other 
persons, and indeed actions are the great theatre of 
its overt exhibition ; still they are only its visible 
embodiment, the outward manifestation of a hidden 
agent, the open flow and eddy of a stream whose 
source lies higher up and out of sight, namely, in 
the character and conformation of the will itself. 
And heuce the insufficiency of that treatment of 
ethics which, in the endeavour to define the appro- 
priate actions or specific duties arising out of the 
manifold relations of men and things, produces 
rather a system of casuistry than any satisfactory 
solution of the main problem as to the principles on 
which all morality rests. The relations do not 
originate morality, they only evoke its manifesta- 
tions and supply occasions for its exercise ; as Bias 
used to say, — " Sovereignty shows what a man is 
made of;' 5 because bringing him into closer, more 
constant, and conspicuous relations with others than 
anything else. And to this inference we are naturally 



4 The Eternal Gospel; cr, the 



led at the close of an inquiry whose object in dis- 
paraging the claims of historical or traditional 
religion,* was to carry home the sources of religion 
and morality to the conscious being we call our- 
selves : nature and history serving only as helps 
to educate the consciousness, and to enable us to 
know ourselves, our opportunities, and position, more 
readily and completely. 

Within the sphere of human consciousness the 
power of reaction pervading all life and nature 
appears greatly increased in versatility and variety ; 
and this chiefly through the force and compass 
of the intellectual powers, the indefinite modifica- 
tion and transformation which outwardly received 
impressions undergo through the faculties of com- 
paring, distinguishing, generalizing, remembering, 
and judging. The single word " is," says Rousseau, 
amounts to a refutation of Helvetius ; the power 
of recollecting and deliberating, of looking before 
and after, of foreseeing tendencies, of forming 
general notions and fixing them in language, confers 
on its possessor, even within the limits of a single 
life, a range far transcending that of other animals ; 
so that while the latter blindly follow external im- 
pulse, man pre-eminently possesses a fund of conscious 

* Historical faith is commonly defended either by confounding rela- 
tive truth with absolute, or by virtue of a sort of Darwinian theory of 
natural selection ; because that alone in the long run maintains its 
ground which is really true and suited to human wants. But then no 
such standard is presently applicable ; it can only become available at 
the end of time, when human experience shall have been perfected; 
under no other circumstances can the extensiveness or duration of a 
belief adequately certify its goodness. 



/ 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 5 



motive in himself, to which in a well-ordered life 
outward impulse bears but a small proportion. 
And hence when it is said that human acts are no 
exception to the law of causation, that will is 
inevitably governed by motives which, if accurately 
foreknown, would supply means of infallibly calcu- 
lating its results, it should always be recollected that 
the most important class of motives in human beings 
are those which they carry about with them as 
their thoughts, embracing the past, the future, and 
the distant ; that they are made to a great extent in- 
dependent of present impulse by these invisibly 
acting motives, which may be indefinitely increased 
in quantify and improved in quality by education, 
and also recapitulated and presented to the mind in 
infinitely varied form and order. Thus a wide liberty 
of choice is practically gained. Moral freedom is 
not the liberty of indifference, or power to act with- 
out motive, but an ample power of self-adjustment 
in dealing with motives, consisting apparently in 
this, that at each moment there exists in greater or 
less degree the capacity of reflection and consequently 
of preference, of choosing from the stores of motive 
at disposal one rather than another ; a faculty sus- 
ceptible of extension or diminution, and not only 
controlling single actions, but by its use or misuse 
in particular instances modifying the entire character. 
Character is, of course, the main-spring or moral 
centre, the form of the will momentarily answering 
the call of motive, the last element completing the 
antecedents of resolve ; one which, though retaining 



6 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



throughout a certain essential uniformity, still, like 
all other qualities of rational beings, is susceptible of 
modification, and to be regarded at each instant as a 
product of original aptitudes and capabilities gra- 
dually elaborated into a more or less perfect form of 
vice or virtue. Even Hume,, who thought he solved 
the problem of free will by asserting the uniformity 
and universality of causation, was forced to admit- 
that the uniformity should not be so pressed as to 
exclude allowance for contingent irregularities and 
varieties of character ; and Mr Froude, in his late 
refutation of the pretensions of a science of history, 
went so far as to deny the existence of any appreciable 
uniformities in human conduct from which valuable 
inferences, unless of a very general nature, can pos- 
sibly be drawn. 



FREEDOM AND MORAL TRAINING. 

The difficulties in the way of a " science of history 99 
arise from man's spiritual or moral nature, the 
essential condition of which is freedom ; a property 
which those who would include human actions within 
the boundary of scientific calculation will naturally 
deny. And certainly it is one more easily assumed 
than proved. In a world of many beings absolute 
freedom clearly cannot belong to any one of them ; 
the existence of one controls that of the others, and, 
indeed, the whole a^oreo'ate is limited if there be a 

7 COD 

discipline or government of the' whole and if the 
government be rational necessity can nowhere be 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



7 



more emphatically exemplified than in such supreme 
government itself. * All finite being is variously 
dependent on other beings, as also on the general 
laws of the universe and those of its own nature ; 
and yet the notion of freedom clings pertinaciously 
to the consciousness, and consciousness of ability to 
execute the will is at first rashly accepted as its 
equivalent. The source of the mistake is that the 
will is always to a certain extent disciplined by 
experience, and also essentially prospective ; it sees 
in front only, seeking to realize itself in actions con- 
formable to its nature, and rationally contemplated 
as possible ; and so truly and entirely is it a man's 
self, as the instrument by which he confronts and 
immediately acts upon the world, that he can scarcely 
be brought to look further, so as to see that freedom 
means something more than a mere ability to execute 
its decisions ; that the question mooted concerns not 
the consequences but the antecedents of volition, 
the dark interior of the machinery whose uses, like 
those of the telescope, are mainly external. Yet a 
little reflection shows that he is no absolute excep- 
tion to the rest of nature ; that the will is itself 
preceded and circumscribed by conditions so subtle 
and various as to make the notion of freedom, as 

* Hence the absurdity of attempting to prove the possibility of 
miracles from the postulate of divine "free will;" involving a con- 
fusion between the conceptions of freedom and irrational caprice which 
might have been supposed to have been too much even for Oxford. 
"If," says Professor Mozley, "free will be an omnipresent agent, then 
every Scripture miracle becomes a natural event."— See Mozley on 
Miracles, Bampton Lecture, 1865. 



8 



The Eternal Gospel; cr, the 



suggested in the above sense by the inexperienced 
consciousness, appear altogether ridiculous. For 
this means only the absence of external constraint, 
the liberty of the stream to flow within its banks, 
the unimpeded action of the limbs in obedience to 
volition. But it is volition whose freedom is ques- 
tioned, resulting, as it seems inevitably, from a 
certain stress of motive acting on a certain form of 
character. And it is immaterial, so far as the law 
of causation is concerned, whether the motives be 
simple or complex, near or distant, visible or invi- 
sible, hastily and suddenly obeyed, or long lingering 
in memory, and elaborated in thought ; although the 
illusion of freedom is greatly assisted by the invisible 
nature of thought, the deep obscurities of character, 
and the almost irresistible notion that the will, not- 
withstanding the ultimately adopted resolution, was 
before the final resolve equally and impartially open 
to all the various motives concurrently besetting it. 
Thus one taking a walk in the afternoon may be 
supposed to soliloquize — " I may now go to the club, 
to the exhibition, or to the top of St Paul's to see 
the sun set ; I may walk into the park, into the 
country, or into the cabin of a vessel which will carry 
me to a new hemisphere; I am free to do any of 
these things ; nevertheless, I will not, but go quietly 
home to dinner." So, again, a man holding a loaded 
pistol fancies he has the power of shooting himself ; 
yet he cannot do so unless his will has attained a 
fixity of resolve sufficient to overcome the fear of 
death. Imagination often represents a thing as 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility . 



hypothetically possible, nay, in some respects as 
desirable ; but this is very different from resolving 
and acting accordingly. 

Such, however, is the nature of freedom as sug- 
gested to the empirical consciousness by the will 
with its accompanying power to act experienced at 
the moment, while the factors of necessity lie beyond 
the immediate range of vision, one in the wide 
concatenations of external circumstances, the other 
in the unfathomed depths of our own souls. It 
is only by slow degrees that we learn to appreciate 
the force of these influences, and to feel our real 
limitation ; to measure, for instance, the numerous 
conditions, internal and external, on which depends 
the exercise of the commonest functions ;* to see that 
freedom is only relative ; that character is only par- 
tially susceptible of modification, its essence being 
provisionally concealed, and becoming known to 
others and even ourselves only through its gradually 
developed effects. 

And so at last we come to recognize the truth 
felt alike by poets, philosophers, and prophets, that 
" ourselves we do not owe," that " it is not in man 
that walketh to direct his steps. "f " I thank the 
Creator," says Lessing,J " that I must ; for if, even 
as it is, I make so many blunders, what would 
become of me were I left wholly to myself! " And 

* Muscular movement, for instance, is so common that its wonders are 
overlooked ; wonder only begins when, in consequence of some defect 
or lesion, the function is suspended. 

t Jerem. x. 23. % Lessing's ' TTerke,' Vol. X. p. 8. 



io The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



yet there remains some thing unexplained in the irre- 
pressible feeling of responsibility, and the undoubted 
obligation to control the thoughts and to improve the 
character which no abstract reasonings can eradicate. 
When Angelo in the drama says with unquestionable 
truth, " Look what I will not that I cannot do/' 
it seems natural to reply, — " But might you do it 
(i.e., you might do it) if so your heart were touched ? 99 
We have an internal conviction that both will and 
motive are susceptible of improvement ; that the 
intellect may be cultivated and enlarged, the senti- 
ments purified ; so as to make the great prelimi- 
nary requirement, "repentance," (" fzeravoriffis, 99 or 
" change of disposition)," not quite hopeless even in 
the worst cases of vitiated habit. All moral training 
assumes a certain pliancy, a possible transforma- 
tion of the character, giving new aspects to motive, 
or the acquisition of new motives altering the 
relative force of those presented previously. Male- 
branche illustrates the nature of freedom by referring 
to the general indeterminate love of good which he 
supposes to be implanted in the soul by God.* 
Intellect, sense, or imagination, represent some par- 
ticular thing as good, and the indeterminate will is 
provisionally drawn in this direction ; nevertheless 
the particular inclination may be diverted by the 
general impulse through which there is always a 
capacity of holding aloof and seeking further. 
(' Recherche,' i. 1 ; 6 Meditations Chretiennes,' vi. 19). 

* " Je ne vois que deux principes qui determinent le mouvement 
natural de la volonte, savoir la lumiere et le sentiment."' 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 1 1 



This may bring to mind the Socratic Daemon, whose 
intimations are said to have acted in the way of 
restraint rather than of impulse or suggestion ; and 
it thus becomes conceivable how a man may be more 
and more withdrawn from the sway of passion, and 
brought within the reach of wholesome influences ; 
how, in short, he may become more self-centred, and 
so far comparatively free and enabled to be the 
responsible actor of his acts and builder of his 
fortunes. And although he is also ever adding to 
the power of necessity by the manner in which he 
deals with circumstance, through the accumulating 
force of character which his own thoughts and acts 
are ever building up behind him ; still if, on the 
whole, the issue of the process be to effectuate his 
truest nature, his freedom may be said to increase in 
the same ratio, for the true nature of rational beings 
is their reason, and the freedom of such beings can 
only consist in acting reasonably, or in willing con- 
formity to the universal reason which is the universal 
law. And in this true morality will be found to consist, 
— namely, in the due subordination of individual 
wills to rational and universal necessities ; immorality 
in their disaffection and distortion on the side of 
selfishness and unreason, rendering them unduly 
regardful of partial and narrow interests. " The 
devil," says Goethe, "is selfish, and does not readily 
do for God's sake what is beneficial to another." 

And hence a conflict of motives, an oscillation of 
the will between real and seeming good ; the wants 
or fancied wants of the bodily machine clash with 



i 2 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



those of the soul ; and all that can be done to meet 
such emergencies is to follow the exhortation of Au- 
gustin to purify the will through the exercise of the 
understanding, and so to "re-enter our true selves."* 
Man is in this sense said to belong to two worlds ; 
in one he is what Kant calls " heteronymous," i e., out 
of his own control, because unduly influenced by out- 
ward things and sensual inclinations ; in the other 
he is self-centred and " autonomous," able to act 
according to an internal law of his own ; a capacity 
realizing morality in proportion to the degree of coin- 
cidence between this individually acting law and that 
which is universal ; in other words, in proportion as 
the influential conceptions or maxims entertained 
about the law are purely and universally rational, not 
partial, servile, or egotistical. The realization of 
virtue is thus concurrent with that of freedom ; and 
the question as to human perfectibility is only as to 
how far ordinary virtue, appearing under the shape of 
duty, and accompanied, as it generally is, by more or 
less of effort and constraint, is capable of rising into 
a form of it which shall be absolutely free or heroic. 
Pain felt in carrying out a virtuous resolution indi- 
cates more or less of imperfection in the habit ; and 
then the empirical will becomes an arena of conflict 
between the opposite pretensions of real and seeming 
good, with the eventual alternative of greater abnormal 
subserviency, or a firmer grasp of freedom in the 

* In teipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat Veritas,— August, de 
Vera Rel., ch. 72 (39). John viii. 32 : Truth shall make you free.— 
Malebranche, Entretiens, 4, 20, 22. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. ij 



issue. But the victory is never absolutely complete ; 
— this point was a well-known topic of dispute be- 
tween Kant and Schiller, the latter regarding true 
virtue as a tranquil uninterrupted confluence of duty 
and inclination, whereas Kant more truly thought the 
union to be never absolutely consummated in finite 
beings. Unconscious virtue, the perfect harmony of 
moral spontaneity, is fairly proposed as the aim of the 
philosophical idealist; practically, it is never quite 
attainable ; and to assume its attainment is an affec- 
tation, or, at least, an unsafe condition of the will, 
which, if regarding that virtue as truest which is 
sweetened by inclination, may perhaps, as often seen 
in history, be unconsciously misled into gratifying 
inclination at virtue's expense. 



ON UTILITARIANISM. 

Much must of course depend on knowledge, or the 
views entertained as to the nature of good and the 
conditions of obtaining it. Hence from the earliest 
times one school of moralists was induced to look 
rather to external goods or objects as sources of 
well-being, than to internal, or to the condition of 
the will itself. And yet, since even those who were 
foremost in declaring good or happiness to be the 
grand over-ruling motive, were obliged to appeal to 
knowledge as the criterium, ancient philosophy 
came back in its best representatives to the inference 
that the highest good consists in virtue, or the healthy 
energy of the soul. But the good of a complex 



14 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



being like man is easily mistaken ; the Epicurean dif- 
fered in his estimate from the Stoic, and no one 
opinion has been steadily adhered to. In the middle 
age ethics were supplanted by theology, and in recent 
times the striking successes of physical science have 
naturally enlisted popular sympathy in favour of 
material utilities. Indeed long before Bacon so em- 
phatically declared the great end of philosophy to be 
man's dominion over nature and its accruing emolu- 
ments of the " commoda vitse," nominalism had 
banished research from the highest departments of 
speculation, and the church had learned to look with 
jealousy at any direct interference with moral subjects. 
Imagination, discountenanced by Cervantes, derided 
by French cynicism and " Pantagruelisme," found 
little to do in philosophy, and except under the cor- 
rupting manipulation of the Jesuits,* no farther 
occupation in religion. Mental problems were 
abandoned to dogmatical theology or supernal illumi- 
nation ; and the only subject left to occupy secular 
industry was nature, nature degraded from her 
higher pretensions, and treated as a dead mechanism 
or storehouse out of which was to be got the utilita- 
rian harvest of human discovery. Man, depreciated 
in his highest pretensions by Montaigne, and told 
that his best resource was to lower himself to the 
level of beasts,f was thought by the more influential 

* I.e., in Loyola's so-called " spiritual exercises ; "— " carnal" had 
been a truer designation of them. 

t " Man must be restrained and kept within the barriers of this police ; 
the miserable creature is in no condition to overstep the rail ; he has no 
prerogative or pre-eminence ; we must be treated as beasts in order to 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 15 



philosophy of the time to be little more than a part 
of this mechanism ; and his moral culture as an indi- 
vidual seemed too remote and hopeless a thing to be 
approached in any way save that of despotic rule 
ecclesiastical or civil. Bacon in his review of the 
sciences, adverted among others to ethics, pointing 
out the art of right conduct, or skilful training 
of the will, as well as the consideration of the 
nature of happiness or good as forming its proper 
object ; the great aim of his philosophy was, however, 
physical well being ; and Hobbes went far to identify 
morality with legality, i. e., with human laws and 
institutions. 

Several forms of reaction were provoked by the 
insufficiency of such a theory to satisfy conscience, 
in the course of which idealism carried the main 
spring of action continually nearer to the proper 
centre of moral life, until at last Kant appealed to 
the " pure will," or the ideal law hypothetically 
assumed to be assimilated and adopted as an inward 
motive by the soul. And he must be allowed to have 
succeeded in displacing utility from its assumed rank 
as a principle of morals. His opposition to such an 
assumption was based on the postulate inherited from 
the later developments of idealism, and more especi- 
ally from Rousseau,* of man's intrinsically moral 
nature. For if it be the essential characteristic of a 

"be made wise. 1 II faut nous abestir pour nous assagir, et nous eblouir 
pour nous guider.'" — Apology for Raymond de Sebonde, Yol. II. 
ch. 12, p. 190. Coste's edition. 

* Hence Schiller says of Rousseau that he converted Christians into 
men. 



1 6 The Eternal Gospel; or y the 



moral being to be autonomous, self-regulated that is, 
or a law to himself, he must be demoralized so far as 
he is decentralized, and subject to the sway of things 
external. And it signifies little whether the external 
things so affecting his hopes and fears are provided 
naturally or artificially, by the conditions of ordinary 
life, or by human arrangements and authorities ; in 
either case he ceases to be, strictly speaking, free, and 
consequently moral, so far as he is so governed. 
Considered as a mere animal unit or centre of sensa- 
tions, his only philosophy is, doubtless, that of utility, 
and all ulterior considerations must be provided for 
or enforced from without ; if, on the contrary, he is 
an intrinsically rational and moral being, this implies 
that those higher considerations are already provided 
for in his very nature, supposing it to be free from 
taint and duly educated. And his education will 
consist not so much in scientific selfishness, or in 
learning how to secure the largest amount of extra- 
neous gratification and emolument, as in the cultiva- 
tion and realization of his best nature, making the 
nature the paramount criterium of the desirability 
of the objects, and changing wrong maxims and 
propensities into good. A good will, says Kant, 
is the only absolutely good thing on earth. All 
other things reputed good, the advantages of 
fortune, even mental talents and acquirements, 
are liable to abuse, and are therefore good only 
conditionally and relatively. The ordinary un- 
educated will looks especially to these and similar 
objects holding out prospects of present enjoy- 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 17 



merit ; and, doubtless, such considerations are in- 
evitable and necessary, not only because humanity 
is never perfect,* but because the universal law is 
only partially discoverable by finite intellects, which 
in most cases have to employ empirical measurements 
to ascertain its dictates. But all such calculations 
circle round individuals, ultimately radiating from 
self; they have to take account of diversified aims 
and tastes, tastes almost inevitably discordant, and 
only the more disharmonious in proportion to the 
identity or similarity of the object of pursuit ; as it 
was the common desire of obtaining Milan which 
brought Francis and Charles into collision. ~No rule 
based on mere utility is, therefore, properly speaking, 
moral ; it can only instruct the moral choice in the 
way of an anticipatory recapitulation and assortment 
of selfishly conflicting interests. It seems difficult to 
answer the utilitarian when, assuming lasting enjoy- 
ment or " happiness" as the end to be pursued, he 
affirms his own happiness to consist in virtue. But 
virtue is action habitually emanating from a will 
intrinsically good, and subordinating external appear- 
ances to its own criteria ; and the turn thus given to 
the argument really implies a radical change of 
motive, abandoning the theory obeying the attraction 
of self, and adopting in place of it another centre. f 

* " No human act," says Menu (Book II. 4), " is wholly free from 
self love." 

t Utility means a relation ; Utilitarianism a moral system based on 
relations ; if now it be said that not material and individual, but mental 
and universal utility, in other words, ideal good, is the object intended, 
the relative is deserted for the absolute. 

C 



1 8 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



Carlyle draws a humorous picture of the infinite 
shoe-black desiring to be made happy. He says we 
form a conception of an average lot suggested by 
self- conceited assumption as to our deserts, and then 
fancy ourselves aggrieved when failing to attain it. 
The notion of happiness being the primary end of our 
being has been justly designated as one of those 
youthful illusions which, if uncorrected by reason, 
will assuredly injure the character, and produce gloom 
and disappointment in later life.* The flattering 
prospects of youth, — honour, wealth, pleasure, — what 
are they, says Lessing,f but a means for rearing and 
educating it, of bringing it to that condition of moral 
maturity when, even in the absence of all these 
things or most of them, pleasure is felt to consist in 
performing duty ? The universal law reveals itself 
first through the lower faculties in those perceptions 
of pleasure and pain which roughly guide the half 
conscious being in the path of its ulterior destiny ; 
maturity is attained only when ends are deliberately 
chosen without reference to pleasurable emotions, and 
when reason takes the direction of conduct exclusively 
into its own hands* Were happiness the true end of 
human existence, it were hard to say why men should 
be gifted with reason, since for this instinct had been 
a surer guide ; and, indeed, reason has often been 
complained of, — for example, in a memorable instance 
by Eousseau,J for failing to make men happier in 

* Schopenhauer's « Parerga,' Vol. I. 511, 524, 525. 
t ' Erziehung des Menschen.' Sec. 83. 

X " Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts." Montaigne, too, in a similar 
strain, remarks on the superior happiness of animals. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. ig 



proportion to their greater wisdom and refinement. 
Rousseau was, indeed, so far misled by untoward ap- 
pearances as to declare reflection to be a misfortune 
and a malady, man being made to act and not to 
think.* But surely he is uot to act heedlessly, 
leaving good intent to blunder on at random ; 
and then with thought comes foresight, afterwards 
anxiety; the culture of man's higher faculty is 
attended with dangers and difficulties in youth and 
manhood, and in age with apprehensions unfelt by 
other animals. Either reason, says Kant, misses its 
aim, or the aim is something more than mere 
happiness; and this something must be the better- 
ing of itself, as insuring by its proper force and 
due employment the accomplishment of its destiny. 
Such employment can only be that progressive realiza- 
tion of freedom in harmony with reason which recon- 
ciles all interests, and which is alone, truly speakings 
moral; but then this consummation is an unseen 
unlimited ideal ; and therefore Kant can offer only a 
tentative axiom for its appreciation, — "Act from 
principle ; act so that the maxims of your conduct 
may be suited for a universal legislation." 

It must, however, be admitted that abstract rules 
such as the above, are insufficient, taken alone 
and unassisted, to serve as practical guides. We 
require to know not only the bare outline and ideal 
form of duty, but the specific mode in which in each 

* "L'homme qui medite est un animal deprave." ('Discours sur 
Tlnegalite. ') So Voltaire in ' Candide,' " Man is unhappy only when he 
begins to reflect." 



io The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



instance the rule may be applied ; and then utilita- 
rianism, which is in fact nothing more than science 
in the service of morality, proffers its indispensable 
^id in revealing for the use of moral agents the means 
of realizing their principles. It then appears how 
largely they are dependent on knowledge ; on the 
many resources of ordinary or skilled experience 
helping good intent to accomplish its aim. Assistance 
from these is needed at every step ; and blundering 
good intent being found to be in every one's way is 
voted a mischief-maker and a nuisance. Obligation 
then quits the tone of abstract generality and 
becomes incorporated in the specific acts in which 
-alone it is profitably appreciable. For though morality 
ever contemplates the universal, universal good easily 
becomes a snare or affectation, misleading the phi- 
lanthropist until its co-efficients have been counted, 
'and its exact import determined ; in trying to grasp 
it prematurely by indulgence of mere sentiment, he 
is apt to overlook the nearer duties ;* to fancy he 
t^beys God rather than man when substituting 
•generosity for justice, and calling for reforms of every- 
thing except himself. Yet it does not follow that 
morality is a mere calculation of expediency ; and 
the vaunted claim of utilitarian ethics amounts 
to little if anything more than the exploded assump- 
tion of Socrates, that knowledge and virtue are 
•equivalents.. This would be true were there any 
assurance that knowledge can be made perfect, and 
.that men will surely do what they see to be 
* See Dr Parr's Spital Sermon. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 2-j 



useful. But neither is certain ; the latter condition 
becoming so only by adding another item to the cal- 
culation, namely the fundamental requisite of a good 
will or truly moral nature. Truth becomes right only 
when consciously accepted and acted on by moral 
intelligence. This escapes notice from various causes. 
The knowledge practically required is often so 
intricate and extensive as to throw other motives 
into the shade ; the familiar and axiomatic is un- 
heeded, and little importance attaches to those 
numerous cases in which the duty is so obvious that 
good intent alone seems adequate to fulfil it. Acts 
imperfectly reveal motives, and in imperfect states of 
moral culture there is almost always a mixture of 
motive, a compound of purity and impurity, not only 
baffling external criticism, but often defying the 
utmost self-scrutiny of the agent himself. Hence the 
two schools, or theories of morals, one looking to the 
better nature of man, the other to empirical know- 
ledge of results promotive of happiness ; theories 
often clashing, and betraying by practical disagree- 
ment their diversity of origin ; sometimes again they 
appear to coincide, and to prescribe the same duties, 
yet in a different sense and with a different bearing 
on the character. Each plausibly maintains its right 
to moral supremacy. Utilitarianism points triumph- 
antly to the wide range of its achievements and, 
capacities, exclaiming, how to an agency so mani- 
festly essential and contributing so much, can you deny 
this titular dignity, this nominal recognition of my 
services ? With all your high-flown notions about 



22 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



duty, you are obliged to learn from me and to listen 
submissively to my teaching. And, besides, it is not 
low pleasure, or individual and selfish interests, but 
only the most general utility, or the "greatest- 
happiness-principle," in whose name I plead; from 
the vantage-ground of extensive and impartial expe- 
rience I make a comparative estimate of the more 
desirable pleasures, and require quality as well as 
quantity to be taken into account. But to this con- 
science may reply, u Whatever the value of your 
services, you are by no means qualified to play the 
mistress. Utilities are, by their very nature, subor- 
dinate and accessory ; they have no more title to 
assume the rank of moral supremacy than the banker's 
book or builder's estimate; by assuming that they 
have such right you are confounding the measure 
with the sanction. You are useful to me in sifting 
evidence and distinguishing what is expedient ; and 
somehow you seem to know the propriety of acting 
accordingly ; but how did you get the information, 
this sense of duty preceding special verifications 
of its import, just as (to borrow an illustration 
from an analogous fallacy) the conception of God 
generally must have preceded the special personi- 
fications of polytheism ? You vaunt the magni- 
tude, the refinement, the extent of the benefit 
provided, but your pretensions only the more resemble 
those of the frog stretching itself out to rival the 
dimensions of the ox, yet, after all its efforts, remain- 
ing a frog still. You enlarge the circle of utilities, 
but never, at least from your own resources, reach an 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility \ 23 



ultimate principle : you have to borrow from me the 
seal of obligation — that which imprints the stamp of 
value on all the articles in your inventory. This, 
though small in bulk, in its power and importance 
far surpasses* anything in your power to supply." Sir 
J. Malcolm, in his ' Sketches of Persia,' relates a not 
irrelevant anecdote of an Arab chief, who came 
ostentatiously riding a bright bay horse of extraordi- 
nary beauty before his tent in order to attract notice, 
and to tempt the British Envoy to buy. " What will 
you take for him ? " said the latter. The offer rose 
successively from fifty to eighty, a hundred, and, at 
last, two hundred (pounds or) tomans ! " Well," said 
the Arab, apparently satisfied, " you need not tempt 
me any more. You are a fine Elchee ; you have fine 
horses, camels, and mules, and I am told you have 
also plenty of gold and silver, but if you were to give 
me all you have got you should not have my colt." 
And so the tempting offers of the utilitarian are 
thrown away so far as regards the recognition of his 
claim to moral supremacy ;f for there is something 
within the human soul to which utilities are minis- 
terially subordinate, and which must therefore be 
presumed to be more intrinsically valuable than any 
of these useful things. 

* See Aristotle's Eth. Nic. X. 

t " All this will I give if thou mlt fall down and worship me." 



24 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



COMPARISON WITH OTHER SYSTEMS. 

High claims have latterly been put forth on behalf 
of utilitarianism. — as if the greatest of known mora- 
lists, — Socrates and Christ, had been of this way of 
thinking. " In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth 
— to do to ethers as you would be done by, we read," 
says Mr Mill, " the complete spirit of utilitarian 
ethics. " # But surely the self-denial and disre- 
gard of things external which characterize Chris- 
tianity, its precepts about taking no thought for the 
morrow and doing good without hope of recompense, 
rather denote the opposite extreme of disinterested- 
ness, verging indeed towards asceticism. The command 
to do as we would be done by, — to love our neighbour 
as ourselves, — is an appeal to selfish feeling, making 
this a provisional guide towards larger sympathies, 
but falling far short of genuine benevolence. And 
hence it is well observed by Neander,t that J esus 
cannot be supposed to have intended these precepts 
as ultimate principles of morals ; for this would have 
been to contradict his unequivocally leading idea lay- 
ing the main stress on purity of heart. J Christianity 
doubtless looks to a reward, but it is a spiritual or 

* Mill on Utilitarianism, p. 24.— It seems needless here to advert to 
the vulgar assumption as to the Gospel being a miraculously attested 
guarantee of an immortality of selfishness. 

t 1 Life of Christ, 1 p. 255, in Bonn's edition. 

X "Outward action, according to this rule, might, 1 ' adds Neander, 
" spring from mere prudent selfishness, leading us to observe it in order 
to get like for like." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 25 



ideal one ; so that, though open on this score to mis- 
apprehension, and wearing the semblance of eudsemo- 
nism in the prospects held out by it, it is in fact 
opposed to all implied by the word when interpreted 
in the usual sense.* And hence the anomaly of a 
sceptically hesitating and intensely selfish generation 
professing to be Christian ; to espouse a creed whose 
main feature is self-sacrifice and reliance on the unseen. 
All religion is necessarily more or less ideal, but 
Christianity must be admitted to be pre-eminently so, 
exulting in the wealth of poverty, the triumph of 
suffering, the strength of feebleness. The memorable 
ejaculations extolling the condition of the poor, the 
meek, the sorrowful, &c, express the feeling of a 
reversal of actual conditions by that intrinsic affluence 
of the soul, which recals abundant stores of joy and 
glory amid sorrow and humiliation. 

The course of conduct, or " righteousness," adapted 
to this ideal frame of mind is, of course, not circum- 
scribed by any systematic or exhaustive enumeration 
of outward acts,t but only to be defined, as St Paul 
in fact defines it, as the genuine outcome or " fruits " 
of a pure disposition ; consisting, when perfected, in 
a complete harmony and coincidence of the human 

* See Neander, as above, p. 246. And thus we must explain the 
seeming contradiction in Luke vi. 35 : " Do good hoping for nothing," 
" and your reward shall be great ; " for all idealism implies more or less 
of the paradoxical and contradictory. 

t Such an enumeration, the want of which Mr Mill seems to regard as 
a deficiency in Christianity, considered as a doctrine of morals ( 'On 
Liberty,' p. 88), would, in fact, have degraded it into a system of 
casuistry. 



26 



The Eternal Gospel; cr y the 



will with the divine.* The teacher here addresses 
himself, like Kant, to the moral mainspring, deemed 
by Mr Mill to be foreign to the snbject ;f " moral 
worth," says Kant, " is not to be songht in actions 
which are seen, bnt in the principle of action which 
is not seen. J By varionsly enlarging the circum- 
ference of obligation, denouncing, in each instance, 
the first symptoms of unruly passion, Jesus, in the 
memorable sermon which may be taken as the 
traditional summary of his Gospel or doctrine, 
penetrates to the inmost source of good, the sphere 
in which the will lies immediately open before God, 
and where no ostentatious pretences of fasting, alms- 
giving, and praying, can avail. § In its search for 
incorruptible wealth, after a fashion seeming to the 
vulgar as foolishness, and in the very loss of life 
recovering it in a truer and more enduring form, || 
Christianity answers to the philosophic feeling per- 
sonified by Plato as " Eros," the son of heavenly plenty 

* Compare Kant on the 'Metaphysics of Morals.' Sect. 2. 

t " It is the business of Ethics to tell us what are our duties, and by 

what test we may know them Utilitarian moralists have gone 

beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do 
with the morality of the action." — Mill on ' Utilitarianism,' p. 26. 

X " The one essential in the opinion of Jesus was a principle so geaeral 
that faith, love, and moral energy seem only different sides of it. It was 
the ultimate coincidence, or, to use a Coleridgian word, the 1 indifference ' 
of religion and morality. It was 'the single eye,' the rightness of a 
man's heart before God. It was faith in conflict with baser impulses, 
love where it became emotion, moral energy as taking effect on the 
will. It was that which, living in a man, filled his whole body with 
light, purifying him completely, so that nothing external could defile 
him; producing right outward acts through the medium of right 
impulses. ' ' — Westminster Review, July, 1866, p. 75. 

§ Matt. 5, 6. U Matthew x. 39. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 27 



and mortal poverty, in other words, the love of the true 
and beautiful, that sublime frenzy divinely conferred 
for the highest purposes,* and revealing through all 
its successive phases ever more clearly its really 
immortal aim.f The language of Plato seems, at 
first sight, very different from that of Jesus, especially 
when professing, like Socrates, to found virtue on 
knowledge or philosophy, as alone making its pro- 
fession reliable and consistent ; but his meaning, 
allowing for altered circumstance, will be found to be 
really the same, if it be recollected that the know- 
ledge intended is that of ideal excellence and good- 
ness ; a knowledge which, as he himself adds, must, 
of course, exercise " the greatest influence over the 
lives of those who look, not to mere phantom sem- 
blances of virtue, but to the divine original itself! "J 
The natural effect of such contemplations will be 
to discountenance the hypocritical pretence which 
does good "to be seen of men," or for the sake 
of ulterior advantage or respectability, and to 
make every one an inflexible monitor and guardian 
to himself ;§ putting a just estimate on the artifices 
of the quacks professing to varnish over the -soiled 
brow of self-indulgent delinquency, and to propitiate 
the offended gods by their ceremonies and sacrifices. 
" It was precisely because the divinity did not con- 
front the Greek in the form of a set law, controlling 
each relation of life by peremptory ordinance, that 
he was driven to cultivate his reason so as to become 



* Phaedrus, sect. 50, p. 245. 
X Sympos. 211, 212. 



t Sympos. 212. 

§ Repub. 2, 364, 367. 



28 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



a law to himself ;* and so, too, the aim of Jesus was 
to reinstate the genuine image of right within the 
soul, as against the hollow external legalism of the 
Pharisee, so as to make men intrinsically good, and 
as such, the true children of God. 

The affinity of Christianity with other systems may 
be indirectly seen in its special precepts, showing it 
to be no unique or isolated phenomenon, but one of 
a family, and having a wider circumference than that 
nominally its own. In his two great command- 
ments " Jesus himself professes only to condense the 
already extant meaning of law and prophets ; and it 
is observable that in alluding to his relation to the 
preceding establishment he mentions the prophets as 
well as the law as containing the substance of what 
he came " to fulfil." Plato and other moralists had 
already enjoined the requital of good for evil, and 
Hillel may well have anticipated Jesus in the saying, 
u Love thy neighbour as thyself," since this is 
already in Leviticus ;t indeed this, as well as the 
other, — u Set a watch upon the thoughts," appear 
among those attributed to Confucius. J Aristotle 
may be said to have begun that transference of the 
moral stress from intellect to will which stoicism § 
and Christianity completed. Stoicism generally re- 
sembles Christianity in its idealism, its spiritual 
independency and renunciation, its estrangement 

* See Strauss, 'XewLife of Jesus,' Vol. L, 243. 

t Ch. xix. 18. X Davis, China, 2, 41, 50 ; and also Tocit, 4, 15. 

§ Thus Cleanthes said: "He who, desiring, abstains through fear of 
consequences, will assuredly commit the act when he can do so with 
impunity." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 29 



from the world and proposed re-union with. God, its 
attempted formation of a separate community of the 
just ; though indeed these analogies are already seen 
in Plato's Republic, especially in the uncompromising 
subordination of the individual to the general, the 
abandonment of all for the purposes of "the 
kingdom," and the paramount importance attached 
to btKatorrvvr] (or justice). 



REDEMPTION. 

The true principle of Christianity, as well as of 
morality, may be called self-regulated liberty ; the 
intended law, though in several ways liable to mis- 
conception, being essentially spiritual, tending to 
coalesce with the soul's better nature, and to displace 
the evil dispositions which not only defile but enslave 
it.* But the prevalence of personal influences in its 
original constitution gave it in the sequel the form of 
authoritative dictation, which, becoming more and 
more recklessly arbitrary in proportion to the corrup- 
tion of its members, eventually made it a humiliating 
servitude instead of a free allegiance. And the 
degeneracy was greatly facilitated by misapprehension 
of the theory of St Paul, who despairing of realizing 
the ideal of a divinely tempered will by natural means, 
represented it as an outwardly conferred " grace," sub- 
stituting for the active word "justice " the passive 
"justification." It was easy, after the age of 

* John viil 34 ; Matth. xv. 20. 



30 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



persecution was passed, to accept a salvation 
gratuitously offered to submissive belief or per- 
formance of mechanical conditions, not so to work 
out the original intention of the founder by a real 
reformation and purification of the soul. The earliest 
speculative views of Christ's redeeming agency 
united two heterogeneous and nearly incompatible 
things ; payment and purification, ransom and 
remedial cure. If sin be considered as entailing a 
curse, captivity, or forfeiture, then redemption must 
mean ransom or expiation ; if its meaning be moral 
depravity or disease, escape from it must be a healing 
or purification. The confused intermingling of these 
several views by St Paul led to much embarrassment. 
The general doctrine of the Greek church was that of 
the initiation of a new spiritual life, or man's 
divinity consequent on Christ's humanity ; the con- 
ception hesitating between that of a change effected 
mysteriously, or through the natural influences of 
teaching and example. But with this there confusedly 
mingled the other idea of a release from certain forfei- 
tures through the medium of atonement, an expiation 
for offences effected by vicarious suffering. This last 
idea, borrowed from familiar human analogies, was 
best suited to coarse apprehension, and was therefore 
preferred by the church, which was thus enabled to 
treat salvation on the footing of a privilege or com- 
modity purchased once for all, and supernaturally 
entrusted to its keeping, in order to be then distri- 
buted in the form of " indulgences " according to its 
own caprices. According to some of the earlier 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 31 

Fathers the release was effected by cheating the 
Devil in the substitution of an innocent soul, which, 
according to Psalm xvi. 10., he had neither power to 
retain nor right to punish ; — or again, the transaction 
appeared as a satisfaction offered by the Deity to 
himself in order to reconcile his goodness with his 
justice, and men marvelled at the exquisite fitness 
of a contrivance essentially devoid of both the 
qualities which it was imagined to combine. The 
notion of an atonement, supported as it is by 
many New Testament passages, became a source of 
infinite difficulty to the Fathers ; for to whom could 
the costly forfeiture assumed by the theory be with 
propriety paid ? To suppose it given up to Satan 
was profanity ; and yet of what advantage could 
bloodshed be to the only remaining party concerned — 
namely God, who moreover was not the author of 
human degradation, and could not be imagined to 
take any pleasure in suffering and death. Hence 
from the earliest times there has been a recurring 
tendency to supplement if not replace the unworthy 
conceptions inevitably mingling with theories of vica- 
rious atonement by the higher idea of spiritual 
regeneration, and the pouring forth of divinity into 
humanity ; for although God originally created man 
in his own image, yet it was suggested* that the 
image being unseen was therefore insecure; its 
stability could only be assured by a visibly 
unmistakeable revelation of the "Word. " Such 
a revelation was necessary," adds Athanasius, " for 
* See Irenseus, Contr. Hser. 5, 16, 1. 



32 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



had God restored man by mere arbitrary will, he 
would not so have removed the inherent weakness 
which was the source of sin, and the renovating act 
would have had to be incessantly, yet ever ineffectu- 
ally repeated. And Thomas Aquinas explains (Summa 
III. i. 1) that it was an essential quality of the chief 
good to desire to communicate itself to man in the 
fullest possible manner, which was best effected by 
uniting itself with a created nature in one person. 
And so the difficulties of the Atonement theory, in 
its coarser forms, drove theologians more and more to 
the inscrutably absolute will of God in order to 
account for it ; and at last its adherents were reduced 
by inexorable Socinian logic to the dilemma of admit- 
ting the transferable nature of moral merit and 
demerit in all cases alike, or else denying it in all ; of 
saving that God could not do what any man could do 
— namely, forgive the sin or trespass which was com- 
monly represented as a personal affront ; or else that 
he would not forgive until he had received a satis- 
faction making forgiveness superfluous. The former 
alternative, urged on grounds of Divine justice, con- 
founded justice with mere retaliatory vengeance ; 
while the notion of ability coupled with unwilling- 
ness to forgive without adequate compensation, not 
only impeached Divine goodness, but rationality 
itself, since forgiveness and compensation are con- 
tradictories.* 

* " Ignominy in ransom and free pardon 
Are of two houses. "Shakespeare. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 33 



REGENERATION. 

There remained only the alternative of identifying 
redemption with moral reformation — a reformation 
either effected naturally by Christ's teaching and 
example, or in the more mysterious way of an exalt- 
ation of human nature — produced directly or indi- 
rectly through his instrumentality, or even indepen- 
dently of it. Both these terms of requirement 
seem to meet in an amended will, in St Paul's 
language termed an inward renewal or state of 
" grace ; " a state which, if perfected, as assumed to 
have been the case in Jesus, amounts in Kant's and 
Plato's nomenclature to " holiness ; " but which in 
imperfect agents can only exist as virtue, or effort 
contending against obstruction. Though rendered 
easier by habit, still in finite beings the acquisition 
can only be approximative and gradual ; as said by the 
Greek, " 'Tis difficult to be good ; " — this is indeed 
the " 6r}pajj.a /3tou," the endless pursuit of life. And 
yet there are certain critical epochs in life when a new 
career may be said to commence by the definitive 
enlistment of the will on the side of good. Kant 
particularly insists on broadly distinguishing two- 
things which Hobbes had confounded, namely, mo- 
rality and legality ; good conduct arising naturally 
from within, and that artificially enforced from with- 
out. Ordinary men, nay, all men to some extent, are 
swayed by sensuous motives ; they require an edu- 
cation, arraying hope and fear in the service of good, 
and adjusting the balance of motive so as to make 

D 



34 ^he Eternal Gospel; or y the 



better influences predominate. But men so con- 
trolled are not really and reliably moral ; as the stoic 
Cleanthes said, " Remove the counteracting strain, 
and then evil impulse recoils, producing its natural 
results." Morality begins only when the will is 
effectually weaned from evil by a change of inward 
impulse ; and, however beneficial the tendencies of law 
and education as introductory to a career of virtue, 
virtue cannot truly be said to exist until a change has 
taken place in the moral nature, (" per av or) a is ") so 
that the law may be said to have altered its 
relative position, and instead of remaining outside 
the agent, to have established its throne within. 
This is the meaning of what has been called 
" spiritual regeneration ;" to ordinary view it appears 
as a slow process naturally effected ; to religious 
minds it often takes the form of an instantaneous 
or miraculous conversion, capricious as the shifting 
of the wind, and baffling observation as to its source. 
Really it means nothing more than the transition, 
in most cases insensibly effected, from ordinary 
existence to spiritual or moral; the " kclu't} mm" 
of Galatians being virtually the divine life of 
Socrates and Plato, the second birth of the Insti- 
tutes of Menu. The idea was naturally incorporated 
by the religious founders with their ritual practices, 
in which initiation was celebrated as a natal day, and 
the priest himself regarded as a spiritual parent 
conferring a new name.* The outward ceremony 

* See 'Homers Hymn to Demeter, 1 235; ' Apuleii Metam.,' 11, 21, 23 

24, 25 ; ' Seneca,' Epist. 94. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



was only a type and adumbration of an inward change, 
commencing when the individual accepts intelligently 
and reverentially the obligations of the general, as 
expressed in Tennyson's line — 

Our wills are ours to make them thine. 

St Paul first brought out the import of regenera- 
tion by contrasting spiritual mindedness with the 
unsatisfying condition of mere legality, showing that 
faith, properly understood, means a fundamental 
change of character, — or in his own language, the 
death of the old Adam and the substitution of the 
new. And though in his estimate the historical death 
and resurrection of Jesus was so far essential that 
without them the spiritual change could not have 
occurred, still for individuals the latter is the 
really indispensable thing, constituting under divine 
appointment their redemption and salvation. In 
the fourth Gospel the required change is described 
in more objective and abstract terms as a Divine 
birth, a transition which all have to undergo, but 
which, nevertheless, Nicodemus, one of those super- 
ficial persons who believed only in consequence of 
signs and miracles, and whose character was, there- 
fore, unfixed and unreliable, was quite unable to 
understand. 

In later times the idea of regeneration was 
obscured by the prevalence of the superstitious idola- 
tries and magical pretensions of the Church, profes- 
sing by outward sacramental acts to produce those 
results which inward amendment alone can realize. 



36 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



It was, indeed, the almost inevitable desertion of 
inward religion by an outward establishment which 
provoked so many scandals ; leading one historian — 
namely, G. Arnold, to treat heresy as ever representing 
the truth of Christianity, and orthodoxy as always in 
the wrong. In the theories above alluded to lay the 
germ of truer notions, and it is more especially to the 
mediaeval mystics who laid the basis of the Refor- 
mation that we owe the modern revival of morality 
on this foundation. Eccart and his followers, 
regardless of form and ceremonial, concentrated their 
attention on the spiritual condition of the subject. 
" God," they said, " engenders his own son in the 
human soul,* and the man in whom this process 
takes place is truly called a child of God." The 
re-instatement of the eclipsed image of divinity in 
the soul was to them all-important, the formal Sacra- 
ment of baptism ceasing to have more than a figura- 
tive import. The " Theologia Germanica," the admi- 
ration of Luther, and extolled by Bunsen as an 
anticipation of Kantism, dwells especially on the 
antithesis of sin in the sense of selfishness and the 
obedience of self-renunciation, regeneration being 
understood as the passage from one state to the other. 

* The sentiment is tersely expressed by Angelus Silesius — 

Der wahre Gottessolm ist Christus nur allein ; 
Doch muss ein jeder Christ derselbe Christus sein. 

Wird Christus tausendmal zu Bethlehem geborn, 
Und nicht in dir, so bleibst du ewiglich verlorn. 

Beruhrt dich Gottes Geist mit seiner Wesenheit, 
So wird in dir geborn das Kind der Ewigkeit. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 37 



It says : " In me, too, Gocl must become man ; he 
must take to himself all that is in me, so that there 
may be nothing to strive against Him. If God took 
to Himself all men that are, or ever were, in the 
world, and they were made divine in Him, yet my 
wandering can never be mended until the same change 
is fulfilled in me also." 

It was this idea of mental regeneration as opposed 
to ecclesiastical machinery which inspired the Re- 
formation ; and Zwingli, especially adverting to the 
different significations of the word baptism, describes 
the rite as an " external thing,' ' betokening, indeed, a 
real purification and renewal, a sign of good intention 
and formal introduction to the visible church, but in 
itself more useful as public notice of fellowship to other 
Christians than as of any benefit to the recipient.* 
But the reformers were obliged to revert to the 
coarse externalities of establishment ; they could not 
afford to give up the basis of historical fact, a definite 
object of faith, and outward guarantees of personal 
salvation. Then, again, there occurred a reaction 
from renovated formalisms to more spiritual ideas ; 
the Socinians in particular holding a justifying faith 
to be no mere belief in outward facts, but the sincere 
trust in God and Christ producing obedience to their 
commands ; God overlooking inevitable deficiencies 
of performance in consideration of the general tone 
and intent practically evinced by it. And this is the 
sense which has generally been attached to a " jus- 
tifying faith," as distinguished from mere work- 

* Sigwart's ' Ulrich Zwingli, 1 p. 19G, 193, &c. 



33 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



righteousness, by the later rationalistic theology ; 
namely, as a compromise allowed by God in con- 
sideration of intention, its connection with Christ 
being limited to little more than teaching and ex- 
ample. And certainly the term " justification by 
faith " may be a solemn truth or a bitter mockery 
according as it is understood ; if the faith be servile 
and superstitious, what is it but to revert to the 
root of Roman corruption ? not so if it mean that 
conversion ^ and redemption are effected through 
the due conformation of the will, since moral cer- 
tainty is essentially a faith,* A profounder basis for 
such a Soteriological theory was resorted to by 
the mystics of the age of the Reformation, who, 
agreeing with Socinianism in rejecting a merely 
external faith, attached a higher significance to 
internal. Caspar Schwenkfeld, Osiander, and others, 
insisted that what took place more than 1500 years 
ago can be of no use to ourselves without a real in- 
dwelling of Christ, imparting not only an external 
plea for justification, but divine righteousness itself ; 
the Quakers, too, protested against the doctrine of 
imputation, carefully distinguishing the outward act 
performed upon the cross from the inward renewal 
or change of disposition, which they considered the 
one thing needfulf ; and Jacob Bohme said, "Men 
use the mantle dipped in Christ's blood as a covering 
to conceal their own antichristian selfishness, per- 
suading themselves that Christ has already paid their 

* See K. Fischer's Kant, Vol. II. p. 177. 

t Barclay's * Apol.' vi. 173. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 39 

forfeits ; but the really redeeming grace is an inward 
thing ; that which happened outwardly in Christ 
must take place inwardly in us also." 

The above theories, although ostensibly taking 
Christ's earthly career as their basis, nevertheless 
show an increasing tendency to make an inward 
change the main consideration ; indeed the Quakers 
anticipated Kant in declaring that illumination and 
sanctification of heart suffice for salvation, indepen- 
dently of any knowledge whatever of external facts or 
history.* But it was modern speculative philosophy 
which first ventured to discard external agencies of 
redemption, and to refer the matter entirely to an 
internal operation of the soul. And this tendency 
was only the more emphatically shown by the 
forced efforts of modern speculation to make the 
historical data of Christianity into types or sym- 
bolical reflections of its own ideas. When, for 
instance, Kant describes the whole religious work 
and duty of man as consisting in a continually 
increasing approximation of mind and disposition 
to the ideal of humanity, it is comparatively speaking 
as unimportant as it is difficult to determine whether, 
as commonly assumed, this ideal w T as ever actually 
and miraculously realized in the past ; whether the 
moral death to sin was prefigured by an actual death 
upon the cross ; whether a redemption, admitted to 
be dependent on nothing external, was anticipated 
by a certain figurative act performed many centuries 
ago, the object really in view being only the recovered 

* Barclay's Apol. Prop. VI., p. 105, 129, 135, 107, &c. 



40 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



health of individual souls, and the prospective per- 
fectibility of the race to which all are summoned to 
contribute. If, as religious men have said, all things 
strive onward towards perfection, and, as philosophers 
have thought, a possible perfection is implied in the 
very nature of created things, while in eternity there 
is no distinguishing between the possible and the 
real,* the anticipated realization of such a futurity 
may fairly be said in reference to human nature to 
constitute its salvation in the eyes of Him who, seeing 
the heart, can overlook inevitable deficiencies of 
present execution, and accept aspiration as accom- 
plishments Not, however, that a mere supposititious 
imputation can be thought to suffice. The ideal 
of humanity may be either perfection consummated, 
in which case, confronted with individual men, it can 
only be an inexorable judge condemning them ; or it 
may be a growing perfection, a process in which 
individuals severally take part,J and then it becomes 
a saving or redeeming agency in proportion as they 
do so. He who lives in and for himself alone, the 
mere slave of selfish impulse, is certainly more beast 
than man ; it is only in proportion as he dwells in 

* See Kenan's 'Averroes,' p. 85; Romans viii. 28; Hitter's 'Modem 
Philos.,' i. 632 ; Strauss's ' Glaubenslehre,' i. 495. 

t " Desert is measured by capacity of improvement ; we say not, 
because immortal therefore valuable ; but, because valuable therefore 
immortal." — F. W. Newman's 'Theism,' p. 81. 

X "Advancing culture," says Mr Newman (' Theism,' p 51), " destroys 
original uniformity by promoting the improvement of special faculties 
in different men ; but under these circumstances the lack of one is made 
good by the excellence of another, and while each remains one-sided 
society is consummated." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 41 



the ideal, passing beyond the limits of self in know- 
ledge, in love of goodness and truth, and in sympa- 
thetic fellowship with others, that he becomes really 
man bearing the divine image. 



RELATION OF THE DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCIES. 

Very different estimates have been made of the 
relative efficacy of the inner and outer light in pro- 
ducing the desired change, according as the sentiment 
of freedom or that of religious dependency happened 
to predominate ; the Bible in its exhortations and com- 
mands generally assuming a free capacity of obedience, 
while yet in many passages, especially in the fourth 
gospel and the Pauline Epistles, espousing the con- 
flicting doctrine of necessity. It was hard to choose 
between two contradictory hypotheses both alike 
scripturally warranted and plausible in themselves, yet 
both misleading when exclusively held ; one by 
severing the individual from God tending to make 
him sceptically despondent or rebelliously conceited ; 
the other by rash assumptions of divine guidance and 
favour leading to overstrained pretension inindividuals 
and churches. And so the controversy begun 
between Pelagius and Augustin continued among 
religionists and religious moralists, until a more 
satisfactory solution appeared in higher conceptions 
of human nature. — Pelagius, asserting freedom as 
man's great distinction, anticipated Kant in making 
an assured feeling of obligation the ground for 



42 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



assuming capacity to fulfil it. He admitted in a 
certain sense the necessity of divine support, nay, 
the divine origination of the free faculty itself ; only 
he would not allow such an external influence over 
the will as would have virtually neutralized the 
faculty, and also implied the absurdity of God issuing 
mandates to himself. The immediate influence 
internally exerted over the will which Augustin 
latterly pleaded for was more consonant to certain 
Scripture texts,* as well as to Christian feeling ; but 
a disproportionate leaning to this view of the subject 
led directly to denial of freedom and the repulsive 
dogma of inevitable decree. This was indeed the ne- 
cessary inference of consistent theism, which, how- 
ever, no one had the resolution unreservedly to abide 
by except Calvin ; the Semipeiagianism and various 
gradations of prevenient and co-operating graces in 
the Church being only illogical compromises adapted 
to current exigencies. The Protestant Reformers in 
quitting the Church could not at once divest them- 
selves of the depressing influences of an authority 
which had been dominant for so many ages ; they 
despaired of Church remedies without recovering an 
.adequate feeling of self-reliance, and hence the 
doctrine of man's entire helplessness and utter inca- 
pacity for good. Yet despair on one side was coun- 
terbalanced by superabundant confidence on the 
other ; the diseased soul generated its own remedy, 
and Luther extols the beneficial effects of despon- 
dency, " because grace follows close upon its heels." 

* As Philipp. ii. 13 ; John vi. 44, xii. 39. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility . 43 



The Eeformers inherited the general tendency derived 
from Augustin by Dominican Scholasticism and 
Mysticism to contemplate all things in Unity, and to 
merge secondary causes in the supreme Cause. It 
was not, however, so much philosophical conviction, 
as the fanatical reaction of uneasy sentiment, of souls 
long pining under Church maltreatment, which made 
them rashly trample under foot man's noblest faculty 
in order to cast themselves in seemingly abject sub- 
mission at the feet of Deity. Yet their devotion was 
not the fatalistic feeling producing mental indolence 
and prostration ; on the contrary, it is remarkable 
how practically self-reliant was the absolute deter- 
minism of the Swiss Reformers, manifesting itself 
not as inert superstitious resignation, but as a 
conviction of individual election, an elevating 
self-confidence and encouragement to energetic 
action. 

The difference between the cases lies in the peculiar 
feeling in which Deity is appealed to ; depending on 
whether human thought and will are considered as 
separate from, or as mysteriously connected with 
divine. Melancthon's doctrine of a synergism," or 
concurrency of will, was a limited assertion of mental 
independence in the former sense ; this was the feel- 
ing acted on by the Arminians and Deists, and which, 
predominating in the ordinary religion of Protes- 
tantism, influenced the earlier phases of its philosophy. 
Such a philosophy, making the world a self-sustain- 
ing chainwork of causation apart from God, could 
not be a substitute for religion, it could only lean on 



44 



The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



artificially established religion for moral support ; it 
left the discredited pseudo-moral discipline of Rome 
to be replaced by another ecclesiastical despotism of 
similar kind, and this is, in fact, the formula of 
Hobbes, and generally of English politicians. The 
only alternative was that of a philosophy which, 
comprising within itself the essentials of religion, 
should teach each human soul to be a moral discipline 
to itself ; which instead of considering man as a 
mere wayward force to be alternately flattered and 
coerced, should treat him as an essentially moral 
being, requiring only the restoration by due culture 
of his best and truest nature. Such a philosophy was 
that of Spinoza, which first conspicuously set up the 
banner of Divine immanency, and substituting belief 
in indwelling providential order for that of super- 
natural interference, was enabled to treat artificial 
religious establishments as mere provisional make- 
shifts with which the duly educated mind may readily 
afford to dispense. It is true that a system treating 
nature deductively, and looking at all things a priori, 
or from the side of God, fulfils only in part the re- 
quirements of philosophy. Freedom seems to vanish 
in such a theory ; and yet, though theoretically denied 
by Spinoza in an absolute sense, individual freedom 
had practically no better champion than himself. 
The difficulty of theologians in regard to freedom 
has arisen from their fundamental postulate of divine 
transcendence, and the impossibility of drawing an 
intelligible line between an omnipotent universal 
cause and individual causes or beings considered as 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 45 



separate agents. For, indeed, true freedom cannot be 
individually appropriated ; it is common property, the 
indispensable atmosphere of mental and moral life, 
and its best advocate is lie who looks for it in the 
universal. But then the universal must be sought, 
not in an artificial external rule pretending to be 
" catholic," nor yet in dead " substance," the wheel- 
work of mere mechanical causation ostensibly con- 
templated by Spinoza ; it must be a living and 
rational universe which religion as well as science 
may acknowledge, and of whose general organism 
each individual soul may properly conceive itself 
a part. It was the inadequacy of Spinoza's theory 
in this respect, his treatment of the universal as 
"substance" rather than will or intelligence, which 
placed him among the originators of that doctrine 
of the "rights of man," i.e., freedom meted out into 
individual portions and patrimonies, which leads 
back indirectly to despotism through revolution ; 
just as the doctrine of the " natural state " assumed 
by Hobbes — namely, of individuals considered as 
mere immoral forces requiring artificial restraint, 
leads to it directly. Such is the view of man as 
known to superficial experience ; and accordingly the 
adherents of nominalism and empiricism from Occam 
and Machiavelli down to Hobbes and Hume, either 
directly advocated political and religious despotism, 
or else that spurious form of freedom based on selfish 
individual right, which, having within itself no con- 
sistency or cohesive power, renders despotism neces- 
sary. There is, indeed, a revolutionary tendency in 



46 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



the very notion of a society artificially formed out of 
an agglomeration of distinct units by virtue of a social 
compact, because compacts are arbitrary expedients, 
and what caprice makes caprice may at any time 
overthrow. And it is remarkable that the same 
empirical assumptions which, as exemplified in the 
great French revolution, produced social anarchy with 
only despotism for its cure, led also to mental or 
psychological anarchy ; as the theory of isolated em- 
pirical man afforded no safe foundation for society, 
so the " tabula rasa " of the soul imagined by Locke, # 
supplied no reliable basis for thought. It is only by 
assuming something more than meets the eye in 
human nature, something essentially connecting the 
individual with the universal, that we regain a 
firm basis for society or science ; in one case recon- 
ciling reasonable assurance with modest misgiving, in 
the other due assertion of individual right with a con- 
viction of general obligation. And this feeling of 
obligation is, in fact, religion, consisting in the soul's 
reverential attitude towards the universal spirit in 
which it lives and moves ; a homage moral only so 
far as it is free, and free only as obeying in the midst 
of its devotion the intrinsic law of its own nature. 
Physical nature seems unsympathetic and coldly im- 
partial, apparently doing all for the race and caring 
little or nothing for the individual. But there is a 
nature behind this nature, one in which the race sinks 

* Locke, however, did not treat the mind as a mere receptivity ; he 
admitted its reactive power, and was, to a certain extent, a precursor of 
Kant. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



47 



into comparative insignificancy, and the value of the 
individual becomes infinite. This is the moral world, 
or what Kant calls the realm of final causes. All 
being, he says, with an excusable exaggeration, may 
be divided into ends and means ; things have only 
relative worth as means ; # persons are not only 
means, they have absolute value as ends in them- 
selves, partaking in a degree the dignity of the 
absolute end or God. And the reason is because they 
really share the divine nature, which is at once the 
harmony of the universe, and also reason and con- 
science in the soul. The agent which creates experi- 
ence cannot, says Kant, be the object of experience. 
All created things, thought Malebranche, must exist 
in God, for the simple reason that if caused by Him 
they must have been intelligently caused ; in other 
words, ideas of them must have pre-existed and still 
exist in Him, so that He simultaneously beholds all 
being in Himself, t And since with God to think is 
to create, creation can only be the manifested ex- 
pression of divine thought. J As in the imagery of 
dreams a part seems to belong to ourselves, while 
part figures in the fanciful drama in apparent inde- 
pendence of us, so in the divine thought, where all is 
reality, parts may be imagined to possess a relative 
freedom, while at the same time incomprehensibly 
adjusted and united in the general plan. " A stupen- 

* Kant's notion of the "dignity of man" 'Wiirr' es Menschen) 
lias been ridiculed ; the superiority should per". \ ) .muted to one of 
degree. 

t ' Recherche de la VeriteV 3, 2, eh. 5. 

t Lessing's ' Christenthum cler Vernunft,— -Wks.,' Vol. XI., pt. ii., p. 43. 



48 The Eternal Gospel; 07% the 



dons dream this," exclaims an eminent philosopher,* 
" or rather pre-established harmony of being*, in which 
each realized divine thonght holds its proper respec- 
tive place and part in seeming independence, while 
keeping nnfailing measnre and acting in nnison with 
the whole ! " Yet why, he adds, should we refuse to 
extend the postulate by which a certain class of 
philosophersf once endeavoured to account for the 
diversities of mind and matter to all diversities ; why 
be unwilling to believe that the Author of all being is 
able to impart the same harmonious concert which 
the musical composer gives to the varied notes of his 
symphony, to all the multitudinous forms of separate 
existence ? 



THE SPIRIT OF NATURE. 

We are so much in the habit of treating nature as 
the passive object of thought, that it becomes very 
difficult to conceive it as being itself an active intelli- 
gence ; the diminutive range of our perceptions 
compared with the wide extent and solemn delibera- 
tion of many of its operations give it an aspect of 
fixity ; and the imperfect standard commonly applied 
to all of them make our interpretations of it as a 
whole extremely inadequate and uncertain. And it 
is less in special adjustments than in a comprehensive 
survey of the general order and consistency of its 
arrangements, chat intelligent agency is to be found. 

* See Schopenhauer's 'Parerga,' Vol. I., p. 235. 
t I.e., the Occasionalists. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



Nature, like thought, knows no real repose ; its 
seeming quiescence arises from the imperfection of 
our faculties, and from our peculiar measurement of 
time, some of its activities escaping us by their com- 
parative rapidity, others by their slowness. Were 
the perceptive faculties indefinitely quickened, we 
should doubtless gain a much truer insight into 
minute changes, we might possibly hear instead of 
seeing the light producing undulations, at all events 
we should easily watch the progress of a cannon ball, 
while nature in general would become comparatively 
lifeless, and its slower and grander movements would 
be lost to us ; if, on the other hand, the perceptive 
powers were indefinitely retarded, so as to supply a 
broader scale of measurement,* 1 we should to a great 
extent lose the sense of minor changes, — scarcely 
observing, for instance, diurnal intermissions of the 
light, and 

" Seeing night but as the daylight sick," — 

while gaining in exchange for this obliteration of de- 
tails a far truer appreciation of nature s totality, 
observing impetuous movement in what before wore 
the look of apathetic stillness, and the living forms 
now seemingly so durable because remaining unaltered 
to repeated efforts of vision, appearing as propor- 
tionately transient and rapidly evanescent as they 
really are. Nothing under such circumstances 

* This, with its attendant advantages and drawbacks, we do to a 
certain extent gain with advancing age, which, by deadening the vivacity 
of our impressions, makes time seem to pass more rapidly. 

E 



50 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



would to the outward eye retain an air of con- 
stancy except the incessant change which science 
already perceives to be obscurely going on even 
in those cases of extreme comparative durability 
where change is slowest ; and yet it would be still 
more evident to reason than it now is that iu variety 
there exists unity, something invariable in the midst 
of change, exemplified first in the elementary mate- 
rials or primary forces of nature, and next and 
chiefly in the general order to which all changes are 
amenable, in other words, those natural laws which 
are the same here and now as they are everywhere 
and have been always, and which pre-eminently 
deserve to be called the thought or thoughts of 
nature, as constituting the rational foundation of all 
its movements and combinations. These thoughts, 
or laws, are generally in harmony with our thoughts, 
they are proved to be so from the fact of our com- 
prehending them, and more especially from their 
having been often deduced from chains of reasoning 
antecedently to their experimental verification ; yet 
they have their source in a reason distinct from and 
superior to ours, since the latter is in many instances 
at fault, and scientific discoveries often start up as 
paradoxical surprises, being indeed never accounted 
certain and complete until tested by their agree- 
ment with arrangements obviously independent 
of man. 

Yet between the natural power creating things 
and the mental power producing knowledge, there 
is a closer affinity than is immediately obvious. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 51 



Both in their several ways distinguish and com- 
bine, and the work of science is only a continned 
process of alternate combination and distinction, 
of synthesis repeatedly corrected by analysis, aiming 
to reflect as truly as possible the perfect reason 
of nature. Nature's work appears to be mainly 
one of distinction, branching out into infinite 
varieties from a common idea ; science consists 
more especially in combination, in the discovery 
of one in many, of the law which nature's varieties 
obey, and which, acting with perfect consistency 
throughout as the master-key of a series, con- 
stitutes harmony in coexistence and melody in 
movement. The materialist insists that nothing is 
to be seen but matter endowed with forces, obeying 
indeed unvarying laws, but producing mechanically 
all conceivable combinations by their unconscious 
interaction. And, doubtless, nature's agency is for 
the most part unconscious in the individual, as stones 
roll blindly from the cliff, and even ants and bees^ 
though acting wisely and with purpose, unconsciously 
fulfil a purpose not their own. There is no morality 
in anomalous fragments, no appreciable intelligence 
in parts — none, at least, until some naturalist has 
ascertained their functions, and by the force of intellect 
divined their tributary relation to the whole. And 
even then many look with not unreasonable sus- 
picion on the tendency to theorize, preferring accu- 
rate knowledge of few things to vague surmises as 
to the general correspondences of many, especially 
if their primary object be utility, and the precise 



52 The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



determination of relations with a view to practical 
applications. 

In surveying a wide prospect it is always difficult 
to preserve accuracy in detail along with a correct 
appreciation of general effect, as the wood is said 
to be unseen through the multitude of trees. A 
musical band playing well together, charms us with 
the exactness with which distinct instruments and 
tones unite in one melody ; but the pleasurable effect 
is marred if the sounds come fitfully to the ear, or baffle 
attention by their slowness, or in some other way too 
severely tax memory and ingenuity in arranging and 
connectingthem. Hence itisthat the second repetition 
of a musical composition often affords greater plea- 
sure than the first, the ear being then more prepared 
and better educated to receive it. And, indeed, the 
teleological aspect of nature is not so much a matter 
of inference as of sentiment, of a mental necessity 
constraining us to admit something more than mere 
mechanism in her operations. Yet it is based on 
knowledge ; and the spiritual appreciation of pheno- 
menamust ever depend on the mental acquirements and 
capacity of the observer. A savage accidentally pick- 
ing up the lost papers of a scientific traveller naturally 
supposes them to be dry leaves, or at most a magical 
formulary ; not so the accomplished scholar or artist, 
who sees at once their real purport. A man hearing a 
horn sounded in a forest recognizes the general 
nature of the sounds, or perhaps tries to recall and 
identify the notes, but never imagines them to be 
produced without a performer ; though it is conceiv- 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 53 



able that a more than ordinarily clever mite happening 
at the moment to be ensconced within the horn, 
would attribute the unusual movement to an earth- 
quake, or that a learned spider similarly concealed 
would draw sundry subtle yet very absurd inferences 
from the convulsive agitations of its web ; educated 
intelligence alone would recognize in the sounds the 
emanations of intelligence, and if musically skilled 
might at once exclaim — that is Beethoven's third 
symphony, or Mozart's overture to the Magic Flute.* 
It is the order or all-pervading harmony of nature 
which enables human science to form from a few 
specimens reliable estimates of many, to infer the 
whole from part, and generally from experimental 
examination of minute details to draw correct 
universal conclusions. But the humau mind mirrors 
nature inadequately, as seeing it from the outside 
merely, and only in small portions at a time. The 
order of nature, said Aristotle, is inverse to that of 
thought. In the former the motive power acting 
a priori or from within, combines in one energy 
efficient causes with formal and final ones ; human 
intelligence works a posteriori, slowly rising to the 
apprehension of causes from individual effects and 
phenomena, and in scientific generalization approach- 
ing more and more to a view of their connection and 
union ; so that what is last in the course of thought 
must be presumed to be first in that of nature ; 
and so in every natural product the active principle 

* See a Lecture by Karl Ernst v. Baer on the thesis— Welche Auffas- 
sung der lebenden Natur ist die richtige ? 



5 4- The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



which is unseen claims priority over the visible; 
the cause is truly the effect or the realized idea ; 
just as in an artistic composition, the words or 
notes are consequent on the musical or scientific 
thoughts expressed by them. Such verbal or other 
forms are successively adapted by the writer or 
composer to make his meaning known ; and so 
nature's products express an antecedent thought, 
which, though {oerishable and evanescent in individ- 
uals, has a life in itself, and is capable, when once 
realized, of frequent rehearsal and reproduction, just 
as music once composed may be easily copied and 
repeated. In one respect life processes differ widely 
from those of human thought, inasmuch as man can- 
not give to his thoughts a mastery over matter so as 
to enable them to incorporate themselves ; he must 
himself provide them with bodies, employing 
extrinsically supplied materials for the purpose ; 
whereas life acting from within perpetually builds up 
external shapes from its own resources according to 
preconcerted types. The result is a process in which 
amidst infinite varieties there reigns a profound 
analogy ; as if nature had set herself the task of 
exemplifying the manifold intrinsic possibilities of a 
single theorem ; while comparative anatomists and 
morphologists reverse the course of her procedure, 
endeavouring to retrace the type through its many 
diversities of form. These in their several individ- 
ualities are presently decomposed and mutually efface 
one another, yet only to evolve a fuller maturity in 
higher and intenser forms of being. Vegetable 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 55 



tissues prepare from raw elements the means of 
nutrition and respiration for the animal, whose 
rudimentary germs draw into their microscopic bodies 
the minute particles of vegetable or earthy matter 
dispersed through air and water, these bodies contri- 
buting in their turn to nourish higher organisms 
which ruder and simpler materials had been in- 
capable of supporting. The process is no random 
one, for in all natural combinations whether living 
beings or inorganic phenomena, such as Oersted's 
example of the waterfall, there is always a more or less 
pertinacious adhesion to given types, indicating an inter- 
nally guiding principle. In the case of the waterfall, 
there is little internal coherence or proper indivi- 
duality in the phenomenon, its permanence depending 
on the continuing concurrence of external conditions. 
Unity is here ever ready to dissolve or drop into an 
abyss of profounder unities ; but each advance in the 
series of typical formations is accompanied by an in- 
creasing power of concentration, until form assumes 
visible precedency over matter, and the elementary con- 
stituents are eclipsed in importance by the abiding 
characteristics of superior natures. The whole begins 
to imply more than the parts, the power is seen to 
mean more than the totality of its utterances. Every 
quantitative effect stands in direct relation to some 
all -pervading qualifying cause. Out of chemical and 
mechanical action arise new forms of existence, poi- 
sonous juices, for instance, being composed of the same 
elements as those which in different proportions afford 
nourishment; thus evidently owing their essential pro- 



56 



The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



perties, not to the mere matter, bat to the maimer or 
mode of combination, i.e., the law or thonght by which 
the thing is realized. And the same maybe said even of 
the hypothetical substratum or ' : matter " itself, which 
according to the better modern conception is no 
mere assemblage of dead particles, but unities of force, 
or the primary realizations of Nature's living power. 
These we provisionally recognize as substance, or as 
the underived elements of existence, because unable 
to follow the chain of causation higher up, or to trace, 
unless in idea, its ultimate supports. 

Yet the thought of cause implies more than 
mere phenomenal sequence, something transcending 
individual substances and special conditions. In 
the lower spheres of being cause seems absorbed 
in elaborating substance ; * in the higher this ela- 
boration becomes itself subservient to the production 
of ulterior causal force as exemplified in the 
functions of intelligence and volition. And although 
in natures comparatively emancipated by the pos- 
session of these powers from external tutelage, 
increased freedom seems at first sight accom- 
panied by a corresponding growth of froward pro- 
pensity, yet aberration is practically controlled and 
counteracted by the development of a centripetal 
tendency within such natures, disposing them to a 
more or less voluntary conformity to the rule which 
in inferior beings is only blind impulse modified 
by circumstance. The life which in the plant 

* So the accumulation of perceptions seems the earliest effort of the 
intellect. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 57 



already attains a certain amount of relative inde- 
pendence, in the animal becomes more or less con- 
sciously confronted with, the external world, and 
enabled to react upon it in the form of will. Will 
has many varieties and degrees. In the lower 
animal it appears as a necessity irresistibly inducing 
it to act for its self-preservation and reproduction ; 
this necessary agency of will receives the name of 
instinct ; it is the impulse determining the amphibia 
for instance to choose their nourishment so soon as 
they quit the egg, and birds to prepare timely nests 
to warm and nurture their coming brood. And as 
the specific types of animal forms are nob to be ex- 
plained from the mere matter employed in their 
construction or the modifying force of circumstances 
without the supposition of some internal impulse, so 
instinct is an obscure and utterly inexplicable thing so 
long as we refuse to believe the existence of a soul in 
nature, directing, for example, the unconscious gnat 
how to choose a floating leaf suited to receive its 
eggs, and bees to collect the stores of honey not re- 
quired for their own use. Man, the most independent 
issue of creation, retains several traces of instinct, 
especially in that parental fondness which could not 
have been safely left to the capricious management 
of reason, and which in other animals is ever stronger 
in proportion to the greater helplessness of the brood. 
But he possesses additional powers of conscious voli- 
tion ; through his reason and the facilities supplied 
by it, especially that of language, he enjoys the spiri- 
tual inheritance of the past and larger hopes of the 



58 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



future ; lie builds continually on the shoulders of his 
predecessors, and from the progress thus achieved, as 
well as the infelt cravings and capacities of his being, 
is enabled to form not unreasonable expectations of a 
higher destiny awaiting him. The moral and reli- 
gious aspirations of man may, in spite of their 
many aberrations, be considered as instincts of a 
higher order, through which the same power that in 
the lower animal insures their preservation and per- 
petuation through a succession of similar individuals, 
tends in the case of man to ennoble as well as pre- 
serve, sustaining and improving the race by the con- 
tinual bettering of individuals. The study of instinct 
is well calculated to encourage spiritual ideas, as 
inevitably suggesting something more than can be 
directly seen, something acting through individual 
natures with all the infallibility of a universally con- 
trolling law, yet acting from within and forming an 
essential part of such natures ; something less easily 
misunderstood in unconscious or semi-conscious 
agents than it is in man, whose greater freedom 
entails greater liability to err, and who never errs 
more flagrantly than when vainly esteeming himself 
the type and measure of all existence, he ascribes 
human fluctuations and analogies to grades of being 
transcending and encompassing his own. And yet, 
knowing no higher agency than that of reason, and 
finding a response to his reason in the order of the 
world, he may allowably recognize a universal govern- 
ment of reason, only it should be one exempt from 
the weakness and caprices experienced in himself. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



" Those philosophers," says Aristotle, " who admitted 
the existence of an intelligent Being as the cause of 
the world's order, seem, in comparison with those 
ascribing it to chance, like waking men among 
dreamers. 

Nor is this belief belied by the fact of the universality" 
of laws, or by nature's occasional failures and seem- 
ing deviations. Truth has more than one aspect, and 
must be approached from more sides than one in order 
to become adequately known ; but we cannot look two 
ways at once, and Bacon was right in provisionally 
deprecating the consideration of final causes in the 
prosecution of physical studies. Seen from the ideal 
side merely, and with the preoccupations of human 
feeling, the image of the outward world becomes 
inexact and faint, like a landscape too strongly and 
uniformly illuminated ; yet a too exclusive attention 
to special facts and necessary sequence is apt to 
engender a feeling of despondency and distrust of 
higher agencies, and that in no slight degree owing 
to the anxiety of scientific zeal to shun gratuitous 
hypothesis, and to include all things within the limit 
of its grasp. * Hence it has been led to deny freedom 
and the moral order of the world, and even to relish 

* " Theory suffers from the dread commonly entertained by scientific 
men of admitting an intelligence present in nature. They do not deny 
an intelligent creative will, if it can only be put a long way off. Their 
ideal God is one who constructed the laws of nature millions of years 
ago, and then died, leaving nature surviving. The reaction against the 
common theological notion of a God working without means, has driven 
them to the conception of a universe of means without ends, generated 
by a Deus ex Machina, who sets the ball spinning, and then leaves it." 
(Neale's ' Analogy of Thought and Nature,' p. 185.) 



6o 



The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



the humiliating thought of the mechanical origin of 
the soul. The attribute of blindness, once popularly 
assigned to love, because seeing with other eyes than 
those of vulgar appreciation, might be more justly 
applied to those commonplace estimates of sensational 
experience, in which love 

Casts down the bandage wound his eyes above, 
And sees — but images of clay- 
Where he deemed Gods — 

Such blindness leads to practical inferences as 
hasty as those of the mite and spider above alluded 
to ; and to make spirit the r*esult instead of the cause 
of organic change, is to confound, like the savage, 
the symphony with the paper on which it is written. 
If the architect have no general plan originally in his 
mind, how can he end by realizing it ? how can the 
permanent types of nature be maintained amidst the 
play of circumstance without some uniformly acting 
principle ? The controversy is of old standing ; it is 
the problem as to the source of form and specific 
difference, whether these are to be considered acci- 
dental or essential. And, indeed, when the modern 
followers of Empedocles and Lucretius treat the fair 
order of the actual world as a mere residuary outcome 
of some clumsy process of mutual destruction, they 
unconsciously contradict themselves in the language 
they are obliged to use,* and forget, while harping on 

* This is often exemplified in the language used by naturalists about 
" principles, tendencies, and laws," e.g., "the laws of development." Thus 
Buchner (' Natur und Geist,' p. 282 sq.\ after arguing with Empedocles 
and Darwin that nature's seeming adaptations are only the result of a 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility, 6 r 



anomalies and discords, that exceptional monstrosities 
do bnt prove the generality of the rule. The seem- 
ingly perverse agencies of nature, its storms and 
pestilences, the destroying forces everywhere present 
in its course, the sickness and various miseries of 
which death seems the only cure, — these do not dis- 
prove the presence of an indwelling reason, they only 
refute the notion of a desultory and capricious 
reason ; they exemplify the effort for unrealized per- 
fection, reproving irrational selfishness by that 
uncompromising constancy of procedure which in 
human concerns is seen only in mechanical con- 
trivances. And this unswerving regularity whose 
occasional hardships cause sceptical complaint, is, 
after all, the only really moral discipline ; for morality 
consists in determinations of principle ; its essence is 
free conformity to a rule, and the issue which it con- 
templates is not that suggested to superficial obser- 
vation by immediate phenomena, but their ideal totality 
and consummation. Nature seems blind so long as 

destruction of prior formations, that alone remaining which was suscep- 
tible of conservation, goes on to say, " the inferences of modern research 
exhibit a multitude of force-endowed material atoms, which, stimulated 
by a principle of movement and directed by a principle of form, engender 
the world by an unconscious mutual play. Looking at the matter dis- 
passionately we cannot but admit that the last issues of a conflict such as 
is here supposed must wear the semblance of purpose. How many 
ineffectually attempted formations must nature have brought forth ! " To 
this it may be replied, " You contradict yourself in talking of nature's 
strivings and attempts, her normal tendencies and abnormal deviations ; 
attempts and tendencies imply subjacent design, which, however, succeeds 
only through a concurrence of favourable conditions ; so that after all we 
must assume an original purpose, without which neither partial failure 
nor general success could occur; mere unguided chaos must end in 
chaos.' ' 



6 2 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



we look only to the separate parts whose jar and clash 
perplex the moral speculator; but these are the neces- 
sary result of the subjection of the particular to the 
universal, and so imply not the frustration of purpose, 
but its effectuation, by means of the coercive forces 
neutralizing the efforts of selfish individualism to 
break the bounds of order ; for all life has a twofold 
centre of revolution ; and it is the part of morality 
to bring these spheres into harmonious correspon- 
dence by subordinating selfish competition to the 
more generous impulses obeying the attraction of 
reason and the common good. 

It is but a narrow view which demands a world 
devoid of evil and collision, and refuses to admit the 
existence of benevolent design except on this con- 
dition. Pain and death, the voracity of beasts, the 
extinction of feeble organisms, &c, suggest to super- 
ficial minds the notion of accident or unreason ; and 
yet the alternative of a world exempt from contra- 
rieties, an unaltering perpetuity of the same living 
creatures, like the so-called " happy families " of 
animals exhibited to popular admiration in the streets, 
would, if actually tried, be found incapable of pro- 
gress, nay of any permanent realization, since it must 
eventually fail for want of nourishment. In the 
arrangement where renewal grows out of decay, and 
life itself supplies unexhausted stores for the nourish- 
ment of the living, the naturalist perceives a combi- 
nation of the greatest amount of enjoyment with the 
greatest facilities of progress. " The higher nature," 
says J. H. Fichte, " everywhere interpenetrates the 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility, 63 



inferior, gradually assimilating and absorbing it, so 
as to enable it, as far as possible, to share its own 
perfection." And this is no casual outcome of cir- 
cumstance, but the effectuation of a purpose. The 
idea of design must not be confined to the narrow 
sense of external adaptation of ready-made means 
in which it is commonly used ; * as applied to 
nature it signifies first — our incapacity to account 
for many phenomena, e.g., those of living beings 
and of species, from mere external causes ; 
secondly, our belief that in nature the whole pre- 
cedes the parts, and that the unison of thought 
and will exerted by ourselves on the means at our 
disposal, may be fitly ascribed to an agency fur- 
nishing means as well as ends. All things in nature 
may be deemed ends, yet only temporarily so ; their 
individualities are subordinate to something higher ; 
they perish when their separate ends have been 
approximately attained, and so fall into instrumental 
means of something else, carrying the process farther. 
Absence of collision had implied the reversal of the 
existing order by sacrificing the general to the par- 
ticular, and realizing the wayward impulses of indi- 
vidual selfishness ; the teaching of experience had 
been lost, and with it one of the highest ends of 
being; namely, freedom ; since the only way in which 
a moral world could have been created was to furnish 
each being with an original aptitude or endowment, 
leaving it to make its way comparatively alone. 



* Kuno Fischer's 1 Kant,' Vol. II., pp. 555, 557. 



64 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT. 

Yet there are grounds for thinking that it is not 
quite alone, and that individual life is somehow mys- 
teriously upheld and pervaded by a higher ; that the 
soul of which we seem to be immediately conscious 
reveals not only the existence of a higher Intelli- 
gence, but its own affinity with it ; its powers of 
originating and constructing, its conceptions of space 
and time so strangely expressive of boundless acti- 
vity,* its faculties of judging and willing, its disin- 
terested sympathy with goodness, its glad recognition 
of the sublimef and longing for perfection, bespeak- 
ing an agency transcending what can be immediately 
seen. There is no parity between material and 
mental phenomena, and the latter never seem more 
hopelessly mysterious than in the efforts of mate- 
rialists to explain them. When Carl Vogt tells us 
that thought is a brain secretion, produced as in 
other instances of organic secretions, we may acquiese 
in Dr Lotze's guarded acceptance of the proposition 
so far as the remark itself may be considered as 
exemplifying its truth, while altogether dissenting 
from it in regard to thought generally, since the pas- 

* The primary thought of space is the feeling of the capacity of 
unlimited movement in all directions ; a feeling not derived or abstracted 
from perception, but inseparable from its exercise. 

t This feeling, described by Kant as a pleasurable recovery from an 
anterior sense of depression, is treated by him as an assurance of the 
internal presence of some higher standard of adjudication. — ' Critique of 
^Esthetic Judgment, Bk. II., sect. 27, 28. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 65 

sing of an already existing fluid through mem- 
branous tissue bears no analogy to the generation 
of a new quality differing entirely from its imagined 
antecedents. Each nerve and particle of the brain 
performs a set task with mechanical regularity in 
subserviency to communicated impressions, whereas 
the soul acts as an originating power overruling 
the strings of the complicated machinery of which it 
is supposed to be the result.* Who has not felt the 
conflict between the higher and lower nature, the 
latter ever leaning to involuntary impulse, and re- 
quiring control even in the brain itself, since the 
increased but unregulated action of this organ means 
not reason but incoherency and madness ? In a 
matter touching the basis of reason we must of 
course trust less to inference than instinct ; and hence 
Kant, while designating the inference of " thinking 
substance " as a " paralogism " or false syllogism, the 
more insists on the necessity of believing the existence 
of an internally directing principle, containing the 
secret of personal identity and of what seems d priori 
in our minds. And hence in spite of materialism we 
may still venture to speak of " our brain " and " our 
body" as of things appertaining to but not our- 
selves ; we see levers and wheels, and are able in part 
to comprehend the machinery by which mental 

* It is not to the mere repetition of sensations that we owe the 
development of our minds, but to the mind's attentive consideration and 
activity in dealing with them ; the slow pulse of the first Napoleon did 
not obstruct his clearness of perception or activity of thought, and the 
less of one or more senses increases the acuteness and perfection of the 
others. 

F 



66 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



operations are carried on ; tracing back the effects of 
impressions to those central medullary convolutions 
when we are told that to every act of thought there 
corresponds a certain expenditure of nervous sub- 
stance. Yet we refuse to admit this substance or its 
vapours to be the soul, or generally to assume identity 
from the mere fact of a relation, like that between 
movements and thoughts. The movements accom- 
panying thought are, of course, easily confounded with 
it ; yet they are not thoughts ; # without some con- 
scious underlying energy combining their notifications 
and again analysing these combinations, they would be 
only a string of zeros ; and however ingeniously the 
matter may be complicated by multiplying and vary- 
ing the movements, things remain essentially the same, 
and the psychological inference surreptitiously as- 
sumed sticks like an insoluble residuum at the bottom 
of the argument. The complicated undulations and 
quiverings scientifically discerned in nature act 
within a given medium ; and so in the sphere of 
consciousness, sensations of colour, heat, sound, <tc. — 
though variously dependent on motions of the media 
transmitting them, are not themselves these motions, 
they are affections of us : redness, for instance, results 

* Dr Wiener (' Grundziige der Weltordnung, 1 1863, p. 727) tries to 
explain the nature of thought by comparing it to heat ; as the heat of a 
burning body is neither the body nor the oxygen employed in combustion, 
but a movement or union of the two, so thought is neither the brain nor 
part of it, but a movement in the brain. Are we, then, to infer identity 
in these instances, or is the relation only analogical? On the latter 
supposition the limitation of mental results to a peculiarly qualified form 
of matter betrays the fact that something more than mere movement is 
really contemplated. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 67 



from certain molecukr groupings and ethereal vibra- 
tions of a given intensity ; yet there is no actual 
redness except in us, i.e., in the mind's perception ; 
nor, again, is there sound in sonorous bodies, or 
aerial undulations independently of ear and brain, 
or rather of that which uses the brain's instru- 
mentality. 

But science is intolerant of anomalies defying 
its usual methods, and hence some physiologists 
devote their best industry to attempts at reduc- 
ing the higher nature to the more manageable 
terms of the lower. " We are perhaps ripe," 
says a champion of the class alluded to, " for the 
doctrine that mental and moral manifestations are 
manifestations of force ; "* as if the term " force " 
were something new in the history of speculation, 
or as if a new name implied a real discovery. 
Force is a word conveniently blending material and 
spiritual conceptions, and helping us to step beyond 
the immediate limits of corpuscular physics, yet 
really expressing only an effect ; and certainly it is 
not every physiologist, who, while insisting on the 
universality of forces and laws, denies the presence of 
an unseen co-efficient within the organism directing 
their operations. " We must abandon," says Professor 
Virchow, " the affectation professing to recognize in 
the life process a mere mechanical result of molecular 
forces." Neither the life mechanism nor its resulting 
phenomena lead, when considered impartially, to the 
inference that the mechanism is everything, or that 
an elaborate nervous telegraphy emanating from 

* Westminster Reviev:, October, 1866, p. 479. 



68 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



nothing sends messages only to itself. The nerves 
are strings each executing a separate mission, yet 
linked together in the narrowest spaces without con- 
fusion or interference. Were nervous energy the soul, 
the latter could not perform many simultaneous ope- 
rations, and the severance of a nerve would be a 
severance of it ; yet the soul affects many nerves 
simultaneously, and partial interruptions of nerve con- 
tinuity leave it apparently unaffected. Even in the 
brain a suspension of consciousness by internal or 
external lesion is only a parallel case, the natural 
irritant being displaced by an abnormal one ; in both 
instances — normal or abnormal — the brain remains 
subject to external impulse, evidently lacking the 
spontaneity belonging only to internal consciousness. 
But the soul's action far transcends the limits of 
actual consciousness, for instance in the involuntary 
and half voluntary functions perpetually needed 
for physical existence. Each step taken in walking 
is said to suppose peculiarly regulated contrac- 
tions of about 140 muscles, and in speech how 
infinitely varied must be the movements of lips, 
tongue, throat, and palate, requiring exact though 
unconscious adjustment, and this concurrently with 
other movements and perceptions of the most 
varied kinds ! There is something surprising in 
the management of the electric telegraph and the 
manual dexterity of a rapid performer on the piano ; 
yet what are these to the alacrity of a power holding 
some quarter of a mi] lion of sensational and as many 
motor filaments under easy control ; for instance in 
the simple case of a friendly conversation, during 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 69 



which each party remains to a great extent open to 
external impressions of touch, sight, and sound, the 
song of birds, the odour of flowers, the unevenness of 
the ground, &c, while at the same time accurately 
regulating the varied combinations of thought and 
modulations of voice required for immediate use, 
unembarrassed by the myriads of images and thoughts 
held in reserve in imagination and memory. Mean- 
time the involuntary operations continue unimpeded, 
overruling form as well as function, though of course 
affecting form far less in the conscious than the un- 
conscious state. " If we consider," says Lotze, # 
" how, even within the limits of observation, the 
muscular fibres contract under the influence of 
mental changes, we cannot doubt but that in a prior 
state, ere the frame had reached its last stage of fixity, 
such influences must have been far more powerful. 
Their source could be no conscious agency under the 
circumstances ; but as in the matured condition 
affections of the feelings often involuntarily extend 
themselves to certain portions of the body, causing 
them to act and move sympathetically, so in the 
undeveloped organism these peculiar stimuli may be 
presumed to have correspondingly affected its nascent 
peculiarities. In the matured frame the influence is 
seen rather in function than form, modifying the 
latter to a small extent only, and by slow and imper- 
ceptible gradations ; in the undeveloped state the form 
modifying power was probably much greatest acting, 

* 'Microcosmos,' Vol. I., p. 314. 

t Erigena ('De Div. Naturae,' Bk. II., ch. 24, p. 138; edition 1833) 



70 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



of course, in conformity to the law of the specific 
type of being. 

THE SELF REFUTATION OF MATERIALISM. 

In this unseen centre of our being must be found, 
if anywhere, the home of freedom and morality, the 
sphere of the divine influence mystically described 
as " God engendering his son in us." But the aim of 
ordinary life would seem to be to extinguish, as far 
as possible, the recollection of the higher,* and mate- 
rialism systematically disparaging its pretensions in- 
sists on confining philosophy to the limits of inductive 
logic. Yet this is only a comparatively recent exag- 
geration, an excess of scientific self-complacency 
which a recoil of circumstance or maturer thought 
may sober or refute. The remote origin of its 
modern prevalence was the failure of the scholastic 
effort to restore the continuity of secular and spiritual 
life within the sphere of religious philosophy. Nomi- 
nalistic theology then substituted its arbitrary dog- 
matism for the rational treatment of religious subjects ; 
and so, all the higher subjects of speculation being* 
preoccupied, there remained for secular study only 
nature, nature bereft of its higher attributes, and left 
as an inert mass or dead carcass to be anatomically 

describes the soul as immediate creator of the body: " Anima incorporates 
qualitates in unum conglutinante, et quasi quoddam subjectum suis 
qualitatibus ex quantitate sumente et supponente, corpus sibi creat." 

* " The best of life is but intoxication," says Byron; the aim of life 
seems to be to die and to forget ; drink, frivolity, and superstition being 
the means resorted to for the purpose. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 71 



dissected, weighed, and measured by mere sensational 
tests and experimental research. Doubtless the 
estrangement of science from theology, the study of 
material and efficient causes apart from formal and 
final ones, was provisionally very useful in discoun- 
tenancing mental preoccupations, and limiting atten- 
tion to that sphere of inquiry in which certainty was 
most readily attainable. Yet it proved in the long 
run detrimental by narrowing the view of philosophy 
and preventing its full and harmonious development. 
The Italian Platonists of the Revival, who strove to 
re-combine religious philosophy with science, were 
more successful in the former study than the latter, 
being here baffled by preliminary difficulties of 
method, and by the sullen unmanageable properties 
of matter, which they fondly hoped to overcome by 
appealing to " occult qualities " and magic. Easier 
appeared the task of the Aristotelians of the same 
period, who looking upwards from below, endeavoured 
to maintain by verbal imaginary links the hypothe- 
tical continuity of the spiritual and material, yet 
practically contented themselves with covering their 
separate pursuit of science by a deferential alliance 
with conventional theology. And in this particular 
Bacon followed the example of those to whom in his 
general position he was most opposed. The tissue of 
contradictions termed the " Christian paradox " ap- 
pearing among his works is said to have been written 
by another ; but it fairly represents the mind of one 
who thought heresy worse than immorality,* and 
* Essay 30. 



72 



The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



who eagerly espoused the dictum of Tertullian, " the 
more incredible the doctrine, the more we honour 
God by believing it."* The intrinsically irreligious 
philosophy of Bacon could only lean on conventional 
religion for moral support ; custom and institution 
were called on to supply that for which reason declared 
herself incompetent ; so that philosophy again be- 
came to a great extent the " ancilla theologise/'f 
and to the theologian all the special problems of 
psychology were indiscriminately abandoned. J In this 
Bacon was followed implicitly by Hobbes, who recog- 
nizes no religion or morality save that of state esta- 
blishment, and sarcastically recommends that divine 
mysteries should be taken as pills, which possess 
sanative virtue when swallowed at once and unre- 
flectingly, but which are rejected and rendered inef- 
fectual when deliberately tasted and chewed. § 

Here materialism seems already half refuted by its 
helpless appeal to religious conventionalism ; in the 
sequel its philosophical as well as moral shortcomings 
have become still more obvious. Nothing can be 
known, it was dogmatically said, save through expe- 
rience ; and the aim of the author of the 6 Novum 
Organum ' was to pioneer the way from experience 
to discovery. But there remained the questions — 
What is experience ? "What are its psychological 
foundations, and by what right are its inferences 
accepted as conclusive ? These questions when fairly 
put were found to be unanswerable satisfactorily by 



* De Augm. ix. 1. 
t De Augm. iv. 3. 



t De Augm. vii. 3. 

§ Leviathan, ch. xxxii. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 73 



empirical data, and then materialistic dogmatism be- 
came scepticism. Berkeley convincingly argned that 
if the sole basis of knowledge be sensation, it is idle to 
talk of substances, essences, and the "unknown support 
of qualities," all qualities being, in fact, mere abstract 
generalizations to the empirical enquirer, to which on 
his own showing he can have no right to assign 
objective existence. Body in general, or extension in 
general, are no more real than a triangle in general ; 
all real triangles are either obtuse, acute, or right- 
angled, and so all real extension must be definitely 
small or great, all real existence is definite existence, 
and Locke's so-styled " primary qualities" are quite 
as conceptional and dependent on the perceiving mind 
as the colour, sound, sweetness, &c, admitted to be 
subjective and secondary. And if these sensible 
qualities be removed there remains nothing appre- 
ciable, nothing from which we can have any right to 
infer the existence of anything ; sensible things are 
only sensible qualities, beyond which the notions of 
matter and body are chimeras. So that there remains 
only soul with its accompanying sensations, called by 
Berkeley its " ideas ;" these are affections of itself, not 
things outside of it. Yet so far as the mere sensa- 
tions go, they are, he thought, reliable and correct ; 
although it were rash to affirm that others see things 
as we see them, that the sun, for instance, appears to 
revolve round the earth when observed from a dif- 
ferent point of space. The fallacy is in the inference, 
the sensation is reliable and true ; and the basis of 
reliability can only be the source of truth, namely 



74 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



God. Here sensationalism returns to something 
very like the idealism of Malebranche,'"' taking refuge 
in those religions convictions which in Bacon it 
had set aside as unscientific and misleading. In a 
similar spirit Locke had already said,t — " body so far 
as we can conceive being able to affect only body, 
and motion to produce motion, in allowing it to 
cause pleasure or pain, or to produce ideas, we, in 
fact, quit reason, and can only attribute the result to 
the good pleasure of our Maker." In appealing to 
God materialists and idealists thus ostensibly concur ; 
but they differ in the mode of doing so, one 
seeking a natural restoration of continuity, a warrant 
for the truth of ideas based on the mind's superior 
nature, the others appealing to an external Being to 
remove difficulties by arbitrary will or miracle. But 
when miracles were found to be childish and chimeri- 
cal, and so far from explaining or proving any other 
thing to be themselves in the greatest need of proof, as 
being the most paradoxical of all assumptions, opposed 
to all real religionj as well as to experience and history, 
there remained, if mental phenomena were to be 
explained at all, only the resources of idealism for 

* In his second dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, Berkeley 
vehemently protests against being confounded with Malebranche, as at a 
later period Kant was somewhat needlessly scared by the fear of being 
confounded with him. The difference lies in the fundamental postulates 
of sensationalism as contrasted with those of idealism; Malebranche bases 
the reliability of " ideas " on divine immanency ; whereas Berkeley only 
says that the sensations conveying the notion or " idea "of an external 
world are created and certified by God. 

t * Essay,' IV., iii. 6. 

X As shown by Spinoza in his chapter on miracles, and also by Hume. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 75 



doing so, by assuming something more within the 
soul than a mere tissue of sensations as their cause. 
And, indeed, this very notion of cause, together with 
others having only a relative significancy for the sensa- 
tionalist, may be pointed to as really transcending their 
ordinary meaning, and leading on towards the infinite 
and ideal. To the sensationalist causes can be only 
physical antecedents,* and Dr Brown, in his book on 
the subject, declares belief in invariable antecedency 
to be the whole philosophical meaning of the term. 
And doubtless it is all that is empirically found, nay, 
all that is strictly speaking wanted for the study of 
nature with a view to physical discovery ; being, in 
fact, what is meant by scientific men when they speak 
of " verve, causae " as opposed to false or imaginary ones. 
But it is far from being all that is looked for by the 
intellect ; and the problem becomes different when 
higher matters are in question, and science is re- 
quired to account for the meaning of its terms. It 
then appears that the search for causes is one of 

Those obstinate questionings, 

Which be they what they may, 

Are yet the fountain light of all our day — 

that is not a mere result, but an antecedent condi- 
tion of experience, an effort to replace observed rela- 
tions by intelligible and real ones, placing external 
phenomena under the rational control of our own 

* See 'Locke's Essay,' II., xxvi. 1.— "As heat in wax causes fluidity, 
and fire causes wood to become ashes."— 'Mill's System of Logic,' Book 
III., eh. 5, sec. ii. p. 397. 



76 



The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



souls.* No mere outward relation, for instance, that 
of a moving ball striking another ball, fully satisfies 
the requirement ; we look further, and ask — Why 
should one ball produce sustained motion in another, 
until we come to an intelligible rule or law of 
motion susceptible of calculation.f Nor is the problem 
even then exhausted ; for we still desire to know the 
source of this law, and cannot stop until we reach some 
original internal agency ; " the assumption that no 
event can be uncaused, really meaning that there can 
be nothing merely external which is not derived from 
some internal power. J And this power is conceivable 
only after the analogy of ourselves, and of the voli- 
tions and thoughts habitually passing beyond ourselves 
to act on the external world. The latter, though far 
transcending any originating power of ours, appears 
by readily responding to ours to emanate from a power 
analogous in kind, though differing greatly in degree, 
and especially in this, that its agency is not external 
and transient, but immanent, exercised, that is, in a 
world whose essence as well as movement is its own. 
Such an assumption seems the necessary basis of a 
satisfactory moral theory ; it also suggests the 
only meaning that can rationally be assigned to the 
title of the present tract, namely, the doctrine of 
man's spiritual nature and the obligations implied by 
such nature ; the conviction entertained by all who 

* See Mr Xeale's Treatise on ' The Nature of Knowledge,' in the British 
Controversialist, June, 1866, p. 452. 
t Malebranche, 1 Recherche,' HI. ii. 3. 
X Mr Xeale's Essay, as above ; and his Analogy, p. 44. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 77 



dentify morality with, religion, and especially ex- 
pressed by Spinoza in the verse which he so often 
quotes — " By this we know that we dwell in Him, and 
He in ns, because He hath given ns of His spirit." 

THE UNITY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 

This conviction was very general in antiquity, and 
especially in Greece, from the time when mind began 
to claim the largest share of attention — namely, that 
of Anaxagoras and Plato. To the latter the sonl 
appeared as a power of independent movement,* a link 
between the ideal and the sensible, partaking the sim- 
plicity and invisibility of the former, and striving to 
return to it as its true home. Aristotle/ whose system 
was based on immanency, i.e. the indwelling of the 
real in the individual, and who generally considered 
the soul as the ic entelechy," or self-effectuation of 
the individual organism, was unable to rest satisfied 
in regard to man with this explanation ; he felt con- 
strained in this instance to overstep the limits of 
individuality, and to treat the higher element of 
human souls, constituting, as he occasionally says,t 
what is really and truly ourselves, as something ex- 
trinsic and divine, J which being the only imperish- 

* " KivTjffis avTT] c avr V SvvafievTj Kiveiv — irdvrcav TrpeafivTaTTj 
kcu apxh Kir-flatus."— Laws, Bk. X., p. 896. 

t " Small indeed in bulk, yet incomparably great in power and value." 
—Ethic. Xic. X. vii. 8. 

t On the Generation of Animals, II. iii. 10 : "It remains that intellect 
comes from without, and is alone divine." In his treatise on the soul he 
says: "As in nature generally there is an active cause and a passive 



78 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



able element in humanity, and at the same time 
limited to transient acts, seemed to imperil the belief 
in individual immortality. The Stoics recognized in 
a general way the soul's divine affinity as an inward 
residence of God ; but it was the Alexandrian Pla- 
tonists who first undertook to explain the mode of 
this indwelling as a spiritual transaction, how in fact 
we are ourselves and yet another at the same time. 
The tendency of speculation in this direction may be 
seen in the 7th chapter of the Book of Wisdom, 
where the divine spirit is described as a universal 
artificer, subtle, quick, all -penetrating, the breath of 
the power of God, who being but one can do all things, 
who, remaining in herself makes all things new, and 
in all ages entering into holy souls makes them 
friends of God and prophets." The basis of Philo's 
system is the universality of the spiritual,* coupled 

matter, so in the soul there is a faculty capable of becoming all things, 
another capable of producing all ; an active agent like the light, which 
causes what is only potentially colour to be real and actual colour. So of 
the active intellect ; the active is higher than the passive, the principle 
than the material ; and though in individuals the passive or potential is 
prior in time, it is not so in the universal ; here the active energy is 
eternal and not in time." 

In the Eudemian Ethics, VII. xiv. 19, it is said : " As God is in the all 
so the all is in God, for somehow the divine principle which is in us moves 
all things." The concluding sentence of the 2nd Analytics may be ren- 
dered — "This nous is, at it were, a principle of principles; bearing 
the same relation to the fundamental or intuitive principles of science 
as the ( ^ls, or habit, science, bears to the whole body of scientific 
truth." 

* "Having considered," he says, "that a knowledge of the Creator 
would greatly benefit the creature, God breathed into the latter, from 
above, somewhat of His own divinity, invisibly stamping His own 
impress on the soul, so that even earth might not be without God's 
image." And then, after eloquently descanting on the wide range of 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility \ 



with the postulate of its absolute immunity from the 
categories of the finite. When disclaiming the fan- 
ciful idea, already disavowed and apparently fading 
even in the Old Testament,* of God's having a local 
habitation, he says that God is rather Himself the 
a place " or habitation of all other beings ; but again 
the analogy is withdrawn, God is altogether inde- 
pendent of space, he is everywhere and nowhere.| 
The human soul, constituting the true essence of hu- 
manity and the source of freedom, J he holds to be a 
divine particle or effluence comprehended, like all 
other transcendental powers in the Word or Logos ; 
its true country is heaven :§ it is the manifestation in 

human acquirement and aspiration, he continues, — "how should the 
human intellect, being so small a thing, enclosed in the narrow space of 
some membrane, or possibly in the heart, embrace the vast magnitude of 
heaven and earth, were it not essentially an unsevered portion of that 
divine and blessed spirit ? for no part of the divine nature can be broken 
off or severed, it can only be extended. And thus a being sharing uni- 
versal perfection touches the limits of the universe in the act of appre- 
hending it, suffering no discontinuance, for its force is ductile." (Philo, 
"Quod deterior potiori insidiari soleat," sect. xxiv. p. 208. Mangey. 
Pope's line, 

"Spreads undivided, operates unspent," 
expresses the same idea.) 
* 1 Kings, viii. 27. 

t So, too, Augustin says : "Nec ita in illo sunt omnia ut ipse sit locus ; 
locus enim in spatio est ; omnia sunt in ipso, et locus non est." " Carnali 
resistendum est cogitationi in eo quod dicitur Deus ubique diffusus, ne 
quasi spatiosa magnitudine opinemur, ut in dimidio mundi sit climidius, 
atque ita per totum totus ; sed in solo ccelo tot us et in sola terra totus ; 
et nullo contentus loco sed in seipso ubique totus." — De divers. Qua?s- 
tionibus XX, and Epist. 187, ad Dard. de Praesentia Dei, sect. xi. 14. 
Comp. Malebranche, Entretien 8th, p. 123, Charpentier. 

X Gfrorer's 1 Philo,' 1, p. 380. Daehne, Judisch Alexandr. R. Philos. 1, 
p. 303. Mangey's ' Philo,' 1, p. 279. 

§ So, in the fourth Gospel, iii. 13, the life and light of man is the 
divine Logos, who is in Heaven even while seeming to stand on earth. 



8o The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



man of that incomprehensible nature which, although 
universally distributed, is incapable of subdivision •* 
of the fifth element described by the philosopherf as 
revolving circularly and returning in unsullied purity 
to its source. Figurative language is the best way 
of dealing with unmanageable subjects,J and hence 
Plotinus, like Philo, uses the imagery of light to ex- 
press the nature of an existence complete and uncom- 
municable in itself, yet the source of all energy 
in others ; everywhere present, yet never really 
divided or quitting its central unity ; producing 
identical images of itself, yet without self-dimi- 
nution ; essential to every act of will or thought, 
yet itself neither will nor thought ; existing no- 
where in its substance, but everywhere in its power, 
nay, in its whole power ; for the very reason that while 
all- containing it is itself uncontained. § 

Such are the speculations to which the mind is 
naturally led by self-reflection, and to which it 

* It is this attribute which is alluded to in the symbolical account in 
Acts of the tongues distributed among the Apostles — a passage so 
absurdly misrepresented in the English. 

t Aristot. de Coelo, 1, 2. 

% " It is hard, 1 ' says Plato (Polit. 277) "to explain the highest things 
without figurative imagery ; and what we seem to comprehend as in a 
dream fades from view in the light of day. Yet even this is not enough. ' ' 
— Ib. p. 286. Goethe says : " Nach Analogieen denken ist nicht zu schelten ; 
die Analogie hat den Vortheil dass sie nicht abschliesst und eigentlich 
nichts letztes will." 

§ Dr Zeller (' Greek Philosophy,' Vol. III., 2, 727, 728) calls the system 
of Plotinus dynamical pantheism, admitting no emanation of substance, 
but only one of force. The passages expressing the attributes of un- 
comprehended comprehension, simultaneous being and non-being, an 
undivided presence of the whole in all individuals, may be read at the 
pages indicated. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility \ 81 



naturally recurs when sundered, either by circum- 
stances or inclination, from worldly distractions. 
Those high thoughts as to the nature of spiritual 
life which only exceptionally irradiate the pages 
of Plato and Aristotle, become, with the new Plato- 
nists, an all-engrossing concern ; nor should they be 
rashly cast aside as visionary and useless after the 
fashion of the now current materialism,* since even 
utilitarianism cannot deny the importance of histori- 
cal fact, and there are few facts more remarkably 
characterizing the close of the old civilization than 
that of Neo-Platonism. This affords an instructive 
instance of the mental tendency to take refuge in 
religion when all other resources fail. All the inter- 
mediary topics of nature, art, and government, which 
concurrently occupied the old Greek philosophy, 
are here neglected, in order to make room for a 
wider contemplation of the infinite and imperish- 
able. And hence the disposition to look at things 
from above, to reason dogmatically and deductively, 

* The Edinburgh Review for April, 186G, p. 298, alludes to Neo-Pla- 
tonism as "an aftergrowth of Greek thought of little intrinsic value, a 
tedious and unsatisfactory chapter in the history of the intellect with 
which we may well dispense." "Neo-Platonism is here termed a " hybrid 
product of Oriental and Greek speculation,' 1 the writer apparently 
adopting the long-refuted error of Vacherot and others as to the imme- 
diately Eastern derivation of these speculations (Comp. Kirchner, ' Die 
Philosophic des Plotin,\pp. 9, 13; Zeller, ' Greek Philos.,' iii. p. G87), 
which are in reality Greek in substance, and hostile to everything 
savouring of " PapPapiKrj aAafoveia." When this writer speaks so 
superciliously of transcendentalism, Asiatic mysticism, and speculations 
on " the abstract properties of things," wc should be glad to be informed 
what he means by "things," or, to come closer to the real source of 
difficulty, what he understands by " matter*' ? 

G 



82 The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



to treat the world and its phenomena on the footing 
of revelation and emanation, to impersonate the 
phases of speculative thought, and generally to re- 
cover, as far as possible, in the spiritual world that 
footing which appeared to become evermore insecure 
and evanescent in the actual. The same ideas were 
to a great extent common to Xeo-Platonism and to 
Christianity ; the former, however hostile to the 
Church, did not treat Christianity as absolutely its 
foe, but only as having become so in consequence of 
degeneracy, and so damaging by a narrow exclusive- 
ness the larger and truer ideas inherited from its 
founder. The speculations of the Xeo-Platonist were 
based on the wide humanitarianism which had be- 
come current in contradistinction to all that was 
narrowly and exclusively national, since the Mace- 
donian and Roman conquests ; a comprehensive 
syncretism, embracing in one view all particular 
beliefs and traditions, enabled him to treat them all 
with intelligent respect, and so to regard himself as 
the virtual hierophant of the world.* That excessive 
self-abandonment to contemplation of transcendental 
things is a sign of mental weakness may be readily 
admitted : nevertheless such turns of thought have 
originated some of the most striking revolutions in 
history ; and if, as has been said, religion be man's 
prime distinction and characteristic, f the thoughts 
generated by such, changes must be allowed to have 
their value, for all those at least who do not consider 



* See Kirckner, v. s. p. 0. 

t Lord Herbert, 'De Veritate,' p. 214. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 83 



man to be a mere wealth-producing machine, with 
only material exigencies for his fitting occupation. 

The doctrine of the unity and exclusive reality of 
the spiritual was repeated by Erigena and Averroes, 
from them obtaining a certain European currency in 
rivalry with the monopolizing spiritualism of the 
church. The authority of the latter was obviously 
jeopardized by a doctrine intercepting its exclusive 
claims to the supernatural, and tending to efface the 
responsible individuality of its subjects ;* and cer- 
tainly it is one which in the interests of morality as 
well as religion needs careful regulation. It was 
for espousing this doctrine that the followers of 
Amaury of Chartres were burned in the first years 
of the thirteenth century at Paris, the spectators in- 
vidiously attributing the heavy rain which fell on the 
occasion to the magical artifices of the victims. Sub- 
sequently the Dominican Eckart and other mediaeval 
mystics exemplified the elevating, f the Brethren of 
the Free Spirit in many instances the corrupting 
effects of the doctrine ; the latter appearing when the 
assumed inward presence of divinity was made the 

* There is an inconsistency in early Christian notions as to the relative 
claims of soul and body; on one hand much importance is attached to 
the body as the necessary medium of salvation and virtual inheritor of 
the resurrection ; on the other, it is thought a duty to mortify the body. 
And hence, in strong contrast with the generally materialistic con- 
ceptions of the Latin Fathers, we often encounter opinions allied to 
Averroism. See Justin, 'Fragm. de Resurr.,' viii. p. 535, in Otto's 
edition. Tatian, Oratio, ch. xiii., p. 60, in Otto. Irenseus, 5, G, 1. 
Augustin de Quantitate Animse, ch. 32. 

t Gott ist mir naher als ich mir selberbin ; " Mein Wesen hangt daran 
dass mir Gott ganz nahe und gegenwartig ist," says Eckart. — ' Mcister 
Eckart,' by J. Bach, p. 38. 



84 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



pretext for indulging lew impulses of selfish and sen- 
sual inclination. The soul can neither abdicate its 
supremacy nor evade responsibility by merging its 
existence in that of another ; yet within the limits of 
individuality it seems natural to cherish, apart from 
fanatical exaggeration, the belief in a higher influence. 
" None," said Simonides, " attain virtue without divine 
aid ;" ;; As the life of the body is the soul," says 
Abelard, " so the life of the soul is God.' 5# It was 
only the one-sidedness of Averroism which gave 
legitimate offence, since the schoolmen, e.g. St. 
Thomas, were as much precluded by their principles t 
from disputing the higher influence in question, as 
they were from allowing the eclipse or nullification 
of individuality in consequence of such influence. 
And Averroism continued throughout the middle age 
to be appealed to in opposition to dogmatical theolog}', 
which, as exemplified in Pomponatius, derided the 
idea of an immortality based on natural grounds. A 
nicer question was that so warmly contested between 
the extreme and moderate realists, as to the source of 
difference or individuation; whether this is to be 
considered as coming from abore or from below, 
as a result of matter or of form, as substantial 
or accidental only ; and it was, in fact, the human 
soul to which realists usually appealed to show how one 
essence could co-exist in many individuals. Erigena, 

* Comp. Plato Protag., p. 341 ; Stoba?i Eclog., 1, 10 ; Pindar 01. 2, 10; 
Isthni. 3, G ; .Eschyl. Again. Bothe, 162 ; Homer, H. v. 242 ; Abelard's 
Introd. to Theology, p. 49, Cousin's edition. 

t Superius agens dat virtutem ipsam inferiori agent i per quain agit.— 
Summa Contr. Gent. 3, ch. lxx. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 85 



Gerbert, William of Champeaux, asserted the substan- 
tial unity of things, considered as differing only in 
their accidents ; # whereas the moderate realists begin- 
ning with Abelard followed Aristotle in assigning that 
several reality and substantiality to the individual 
which can alone give a deeper interest to physical 
studies. Cornelius Agrippa may be cited as exem- 
plifying in the succeeding age the ideas of Platonic 
realism, which holding the universe to be pervaded 
by a soul invisibly uniting it with Grod, resolved all 
causation into divine agency ;f while nominalism, 
the common parent of dogmatical theology and 
modern science, was driven to study the indivi- 
dual, endeavouring to trace the series of empirical 
causes by aid of the senses. The issues of the two 
theories of course differ as their aims. Science tries 
to explain the higher nature through the inferior, to 
resolve life into an outcome of force, and generally 
to follow substance to its ultimate individualities or 
molecules and the mechanical or chemical laws of 
their interaction ; realistic or ideal philosophy seeks 
the teleological and moral, resolving as far as possible 
the lower nature into the higher, and generally trying 
to show the universal prevalence of the highest 
agencies known to human consciousness. Nature at 

* In empirical aggregates, tliey said, the parts are contained within 
the whole ; not so in real existence, where the whole, i.e., the universal 
idea, is contained in each of the several individuals or parts. — Hitter's 
4 Hist, Chris. Philos.,' Vol. III., pp. 263, 357. 

t F. Patritius recommended a similar theory to those abettors of a 
very different kind of universalism, the Jesuits, as a panacea for the 
divisions of Germany. 



86 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



both its extremities is impervious to bodily sense, 
in the atomic forces underlying appearances as in 
the general agencies overruling them ; yet if (as we 
can scarcely doubt) these extremes, which are acces- 
sible only to thought, are invisibly connected, they 
pass into one another, and so furnish from the ideal 
point of their intercommunion a sounder basis of 
morals than can be afforded by either separateh". 
Giordano Bruno had already endeavoured to efface 
their seeming incongruity when Descartes interposed 
with a theory threatening their indefinite separation. 
The problem of the intrinsically different and incom- 
mensurable nature of those mental and material 
phenomena which in man seem actually correlated 
and united, offered only a choice of difficulties ; and 
hence a long oscillation between two opinions, an 
alternate renunciation of one refractory element in 
favour of the other, either resolving matter into 
mind, or mind into matter. The latter alternative 
seems now the more popular of the two ; and yet, 
considering the increasing tendency to resolve matter 
into force,* and that the best, perhaps only source of 
certainty which we possess is mental consciousness,t 
it may eventually prove more satisfactory to adopt 
the opposite hypothesis treating matter as a mani- 

* Atoms or molecules are only an hypothesis invented for the purpose 
1 4 making nature more easily accessible to conception and calculation ; 
an hypothesis often pushed far beyond its legitimate limits, but to which 
philosophy owes no absolute allegiance. 

t The Italian philosophers of the Revival had already reached this 
inference, some, as Cesalpini and Cremonini, going so far as to say that 
even the divine mind could only know itself and its own thoughts. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 87 



festation of mind, or of that originating power of 
which we are internally conscious. And then, since 
it seems impossible to obtain any effectual guarantee 
for the reliability of impressions unless by an appeal 
to God, we not only return to the position taken by 
Corn. Agrippa and Campanella, and subsequently 
by Descartes, that to doubt them were to impugn 
the divine veracity, but are further led to assume 
with Malebranche a participation in the divine ideas, 
and even that substantial identity or unity of exist- 
ence which, only feebly resisted by Malebranche,*' 
was fully adopted by Spinoza. And when Leibnitz, 
in attempting to approach nearer to actual conditions, 
severed Spinoza's ideal substance into separate frag- 
ments or " monads,' ' each an original force or true 
■cause in itself, he found himself ultimately obliged to 
withdraw from this position, and to restore the inter- 
rupted unity by postulating an original bond of divine 
co-ordination or " pre-established harmony."f The 
necessity of this reference in some form or other is 
shown by the general issues of sensational philosophy 
as above stated in Berkeley and Hume, the latter of 
whom faintly anticipates Kant by appealing, in the 
midst of his scepticism, to incomprehensible instinct , 
in other words, to man's spiritual nature, and who in 
a manner retracts his denial of the reliability of 
consciousness by saying that if ignorance be sufficient 
ground for denial, we must deny all energy in the 

* See especially Entretien 8th. 

t Which he sometimes admits to be God—" Deus, sive Harmonia 
rerum."— Erdmann, Grundriss der Gesch. der Philos., ii. 229. 



88 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



Supreme Being as well as in the grossest matter.* In 
ridiculing the Oceasionalists, Hume makes no effort 
to meet their difficulties, which must continue so 
long as we are less familiar with the faculty than with 
the function. The notion of the mind's creating 
ideas out of impressions, which appeared so monstrous 
to Malebranche, presents no difficulty to ordinary feel- 
ing, because ordinary feeling tacitly assumes the power 
which Hume denies. Yet when Spinoza asserts the 
human mind to be part of the infinite intellect of God, 
that when we talk of perceiving this or that, we mean 
that God, not in his absolute but in his relative 
capacity, as constituting the soul's essence, entertains 
this or that idea, a shock is given to conventional feel- 
ing, and a suspicion arises that the divine personality 
is infringed. And so it would be were the divine 
limited like the human ; but it is the peculiarity of 
the divine to be unlimited, and that not only as re- 
gards quantity, but also quality and vitality. The 
seat of personality is intelligent will, which in man 
is essentially local, circumscribed by other beings, 
limited in time and space ; yet susceptible of a per- 
petual growth, and educated among multifarious phe- 
nomenal contrasts so as to become more and more 
enabled to overlook distinctions in a comprehensive 
survey of correlation and harmony ;f and although 
ordinary personality ever falls short in such 
a process, it is not impossible to suppose a 
personality independent of external barriers, and 

* Enquiry, sect, vii., vol. iv. p. 83. 

t As Humboldt's intellectual career culminated in his " Cosmos." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 89 



excluding all exclusiveness. Of such a nature 
we may conceive the divine personality, as en- 
compassing our own without being identified with it, 
or indeed bounded by that of existing beings. Nature 
is life inexhaustibly renewed, and it was the defect of 
the theory of Spinoza that, after having resolved mul- 
tiplicity into unity, he failed to account for multiplicity, 
or to say why there should be a world at all. Jacob 
Bohme anticipated the defect by remarking that an 
absolutely unique existence is properly no existence ; 
it is the repose of death, in which there can be neither 
joy, nor knowledge, nor goodness. There must be a 
nay, he thought, as well as a yea, in the divine nature ; 
contrariety and diversity as well as unity ; and hence 
Hegel was led to postulate divine movement as well 
as divine " substance ;" and that not only as of one 
playing a metaphysical game of hide and seek, of self- 
alienation and recovery with himself, but as contain- 
ing within Himself all real life and movement. The 
spiritual life, like the bodily, is a perpetual extinguish- 
ment and renewal, a displacement of the subjective 
by the objective or universal ; and so it may be 
regarded as a passing phase of the universal spirit 
whose unceasing energy is its essence or principle. 
Plotinus, says Hegel, was considered a dreamer for 
asserting that God is thought, and as such ever pre* 
sent in thought ; yet how does this differ, except in a 
more refined form of expression, from the Christian 
notion of God's having been once personally incarnate, 
and moreover now and ever present in the spirit ? 
Consciousness consists essentially in self-recovery, 



90 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



self-comprehension, self-concentration, and God must 
be conceived as wholly consciousness, not indeed in 
the sense of mere abstract thought, but as including 
all being as well as thought, since in Him to think is 
to create ; and for the consummation of the absolute 
personality or consciousness, the round of divine 
thought returning to itself, no less was required than 
all worlds, all life, all thought, all time, all history. 
"We have arrived," he continues, "at that last stage 
of speculation, when the contrast of finite and infinite 
begin to disappear, the latter ceasing to be an unreal 
abstraction, the former overpassing in idea the limits 
of its littleness. Spirit becomes truly spirit only when 
recognizing its oneness with the infinite ; accompany- 
ing in idea the evolution of the divine spirit, which 
not only realizes itself in external nature, bat also in 
the universe of thought." 



THE NATURE OF FREEDOM. 

These views are in accordance with Christianity,* 
and they indicate the point where freedom and obliga- 
tion — the two fundamental principles of morals — 
converge ; their common centre may be said, in the 
best sense of the word, to be religion ; for this is the 
soul's aspiration to re-unite itself with its source, 

* Christians, for instance, believe that man's soul is the temple of 
God, who dwells within them, and in whom they live and move ; at 
least this is the language of the New Testament, which tells us that there 
are many gifts but one spirit, which is not only above, but in and 
through all. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 91 



recovering in the re-union its truest self. Freedom 
has well been said to be the divine image in 
human ity,* the Archimedean point, the prolific yet 
dubious germ whence flow man's highest excellences 
and also his worst degradation. Though invisible, and 
therefore non-existent to empirical philosophy, it is 
ever present to the soul as an idea, which the latter 
strives to realize at first outwardly, and by rude and 
boisterous expedients, as if the aim were mere im- 
munity from restraint, a something only to be got at 
others' expense ; afterwards, taught moderation by 
experience, and made aware that too much of seeming 
liberty means real restraint, it endeavours to realize 
a truer and subtler freedom by winningf the empire 
over self through cultivation of reason, and by rational 
conformity with the universal order, of which, in 
proportion to the degree of such conformity, itself 
may be said to be a part. As in sociology the idea 
of a separately acting and contracting individual has 
given place to that of a being naturally and organi- 
cally social, possessing in fact no innate or abstract 
rights except as member of society, so in the universe 
there can be no separate freedom, but only participa- 
tion in the general right of self-determination derived 
from reason itself. The long continued struggle for 
individual freedom in the sense of diminution of 

* Philo, * Quod Deus sit immutabilis, 1 Mang. 1, p. 279. 
t Man, who man would be 
Must win the empire of himself ; in it 
Must be supreme, establishing his throne 
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy 
Of hopes and fear3, being himself alone. — Shelley. 



92 The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



restraint, can little avail unless freedom be better 
understood as a thing to be realized inwardly within the 
soul. True freedom is identical with right, or with the 
rational law which purblind selfishness may mistake, 
but which all men are interested in maintaining. 
And the difference between the true and false is 
especially seen in this, that " right " or true freedom 
confers on each of the successful claimants an advan- 
tage greater in proportion to their number ; whereas, 
u rights," considered as several privileges or fran- 
chises, are only the special prizes of individual cupidity, 
in which one man's gain is another's loss, the value of 
the shares diminishing in proportion as their number 
increases. It is this last notion of freedom which is 
chiefly prevalent at the present day, when short- 
sighted individualism has been outrageously deve-' 
loped in consequence of an unwonted growth of 
material prosperity, and the crumbling away of 
ancient landmarks, leaving behind no adequately 
counteracting barrier of authority or reason. For it 
seems to be an inevitable law of progress where pro- 
gress is possible, that physical existence must first 
expand, and that the first effect of its expansion in a 
wealthy class should be to encourage irregular caprice 
and a dangerous saturnalia of selfishness. Then, 
education having little advanced beyond the rudi- 
ments, and reason falling short of its due authority 
in the soul, necessity calls for centralization, some 
strong external rule which may make life safe if 
neither innocent nor dignified. The imperialism or 
ecclesiasticism resorted to under such circumstances 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 93 



is indeed better than anarchy, but it betokens the 
decline of morality and of true civilization, which in 
consequence have been supposed in modern as well as 
ancient theories to move in a fatal round rather than 
a continuous line. For at the crisis above indicated, 
where men cease to be controlled by traditional 
habits, and aristocratic routine merges into demo- 
cratic tyranny — the path leading to ulterior stages of 
social improvement is proverbially " narrow and 
straight so that here progress is commonly arrested, 
because the cultivation of the higher faculties is for 
the many extremely arduous, while the gratification 
of the lower, especially in the above circumstances, is 
comparatively easy. By ministering to these lower 
propensities, tranquillity and peace, the immediate 
ends of selfish government, are readily attained ; and 
so, betrayed by his leaders and untrue to himself, man 
rarely reaches the moral elevation of which he is 
susceptible, his freedom being bartered for imme- 
diate ease and physical well being.* And whatever 
displaces freedom, decentralizing the agent by making 
the springs of action external, whether it be despotic 
force, or the enslaving passions, the selfishness and 
selfishly utilitarian principles leading to despotism, 
all these are inevitably subversive of moral life, with- 
out which external affluence only expedites decay. 
It is of the more importance to form clear ideas on 
this subject, because the habitual traffickers in human 

* " Man's spirit, ever pressing on uncontrolled, and overleaping in its 
impetuosity the joys of eartb, this will I drag through life's wilderness, 
through vapid unmeaningness.*'— Mephistophiles in Faust. 



94 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 

degradation and credulity are ever ready to take 
advantage of ambiguities of language in order to 
misrepresent them. While freedom is treated as 
privilege, and salvation administered as a "grace," 
while divine law is known only as a medley of pre- 
cepts indiscriminately gathered from the Old and 
New Testaments, and human nature only as a sinful 
thing to be coerced, instead of a divine faculty to be 
educated, it cannot be expected that the product 
should exceed the low standard of the system, or that 
" beggarly elements" should be prolific of mental rege- 
neration. "When, for instance, Dr Pusey stated, that 
" the liberty of the clergy means oppression to the 
people, "* the proposition is unquestionably true of 
a retrograde clergy devoted to superstition and class 
interests ; and it also gains a show of plausibility 
from the fact that established abuses live by vulgar 
support, so that true reform often has to stem the 
tide of unreasoning unpopularity, and the people 
may be said to be " oppressed " when their prejudices 
are invaded. Again when it was saidf that miracles 
are natural results of divine free agency, an instruc- 
tive instance was afforded of the way in which dis- 
torted conceptions of the nature of God are the 
inevitable consequence of false notions of man's : 
* Dr Pusey 's letter to tlie Times, March 4, 1863. 

t See an article in the Saturday Review, Sept. 15, I860, on MrMozley's 
Bampton Lectures on Miracles, in which the exploded sophistries 
about two natures, i.e. two mutually incompatible physical natures, and 
two kinds of reason, a higher and a lower, are repeated. The reader is 
requested not to confound the distinction here attempted in regard to 
two modes of physical operation with that taken above (p. 40), as to the 
physical and moral. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 95 

and in the language lately held in a popular journal* 
as to 11 religious doubt being the child of political 
despair, vanishing in the free air of popular life," a 
mistaken idea of freedom again becomes the source 
of fallacy, by which the respect really due to inquir- 
ing sincerity is unexpectedly transferred to unreflect- 
ing prejudice and sceptical indifference. 

Morality admits no better definition than freedom 
well understood ; but how difficult so to rear the 
moral being as to make the intended meaning clear 
and its practical application safe ? No animal, say 
physiologists, is so impatient of restraint in infancy as 
man, none at a later age has to go through so hard a 
struggle between soul and body ; the latter far exceed- 
ing tlje other in apparent bulk, yet indicating by the 
position and careful protection given to the soul's 
peculiar organ in human beings,t that provision has 
here been made within the creature for enabling it to 
do independently what elsewhere nature does more 
immediately herself. Every human life thus becomes 
a momentous internal conflict, and the life of nations 
involves a similar antagonism, which with the growth 
of reflection attracts the notice of the actors concerned, 
and so gets incorporated in their literature. The 
popular epic of earlier date is at this crisis superseded 

* See Athenceum of January 6th, 1866. 

t Some of the inferior animals consist of little more than mouth and 
viscera, the nervous system being entirely subordinate ; and it is not a 
little remarkable, says Dr Carpenter (' Human Physiology,' p. 253), that 
in the testaceous mollusca the portion of the body containing the most 
important nervous centres should be protruded without the shell, while 
the principal viscera are retained within it. 



96 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



by lays and legends more specifically sentimental or 
moral. All barbarism implies an ascendancy of 
enslaving passion, and never were passion and super- 
stition exhibited in broader contrast or fiercer ex- 
tremes than in the middle ages. To harmonize and 
reunite the sundered spheres of moral and physical 
existence is the general aim of civilization, and to 
this the poetry of Romance and the gnomic and 
didactic efforts which immediately succeeded it were 
mainly addressed. # In nations as in individuals, the 
power which first rouses the moral element is the 
feeling of the beautifulf and the enthusiasm of sen- 
timent. . The mediaeval lays of love breathe a spirit 
akin to that which raises the boy into the man, and 
chivalry blended the two great cotemporary impulses, 
religion and war, in one adventurous purpose of a 
disinterested and ideal nature. Yet the two phases 
of life still continued apart, and a youth of riot was 
commonly redeemed only by seeking in age the refuge 
of the cowl. The spiritual was ill- conceived, the 
worldly coarsely exaggerated. The poem of Lam- 

* National literature did not begin until the clergy, withdrawn to the 
cloister or university, devoted themselves to the cultivation of a peculiar 
literature of their own, with which the people had neither sympathy nor 
capacity to grapple ; it was at the close of the eleventh century that the 
awakening of a new mental activity among the people originated a new 
literature expressed in the vernacular, namely, the Romance or Proven- 
cale dialect of Southern France. And thus mediaeval literature became 
sundered into two branches, one specifically Christian and theological 
the other, blending heathen and Christian ideas in a genuinely moral 
spirit. 

t 4i Only through the morning gate of the beautiful 
Lies thy way to Wisdom's land " — 

says Schiller, in * The Artists.' 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 97 

brecht on the exploits of Alexander chiefly describes 
the onter life, which, as seen in the age of Bar- 
barossa, it aptly compares to the tempestuous 
ocean ; and it is only at the close of his long career 
of victory that the hero arrives before the angel - 
guarded gates of Paradise, where, in answer to his 
summons he receives the significant gift of a stone 
outweighing mountains yet balanced by a feather 
which teaches the world's conqueror the lesson of 
sobriety. In the Parcival the higher life is an influ- 
ence mysteriously pervading the lower throughout, 
and requiring incessant sacrifices of worldly things , 
yet in itself remaining unexplained and enigmatical ; 
Dante gives to the ideal more expansion and dis- 
tinctness, leading through the hell and purgatory 
of the actual especially represented in the former 
poems, to a full view of Paradise, though of course 
only the mystical one of Aquinas and Bonaventura. 
The later minstrels dwell on the internal life more 
particularly and abstractedly ; they sing the praises 
of the much wanted virtues of " steadiness " and 
" moderation," f and under protection of the Swabian 
Emperors begin to indulge in unscrupulous 
invectives against Rome. Yet Dante saw no 
remedy for that strange rivalry between Church and 
State which antiquity knew not, and which seemed to- 
have definitively assigned soul and body to different 
masters, than a just apportionment of authority 
between the claimants, confining each form of 

* Gervinus, 'History of German Poetry,' I., p. 229. 
t Thomasin and Freidank,— About a. p. 1220 or 1230. 

H 



98 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



administration to its proper work.* But the time 
approached when, through the manifest incompetency 
of the church to execute the task assigned to it,t its 
dominion was to reach its natural termination in the 
consolidation of spiritual life with secular. Proved 
to be incorrigible from within by the ineffectual efforts 
for reform made in the beginning of the fifteenth 
century at Constance and Basle, as well as by its 
increasing effrontery in outraging conscience^ it 

* Two sims were wont to point the twofold way, 
That of the world, and that to God which leads ; 
The one hath quenched the other. Purg. xvi. 106. 

f Thus Dante, in the ' Inferno,' Cant, xix., tells Nicholas III. : 

Your Gods are made of silver and of gold ; 
And wherein differ from idolaters' 
Save that their God is one, yours manifold— 
And were it not that I am still controlled 
By reverence for those mighty keys — 
Words more severe than these I would bestow ; 
To you St John referred, O shepherds vile, 
When she who sits on many waters, had 
Been seen with kings her person to defile. 

Wright's ' Translation.' 
Comp. the art : Piguera in Didot's 'Xouvelle Dictionaire Universelle,' 
and Villemain's ' Moyen Age,' I., p. 179. 

X The sale of pardons or " indigencies " was an old complaint. 
Pierre Cardinal (' Fauriel, Poesie Provencale,' Vol. II., p. 220) 
denounces "the infamous priests who monopolize the fraud and 
treason of the world ; who extort our all to pay for their indigencies, 
and hold it fast when they have got it. ' ' And Chaucer describes the arrival 
of the '-Pardonere " or Indulgence-broker fresh from Rome, amply 
furnished with reliquary odds and ends : 
"A gobbet of the sail 
Which Peter had when that he went 
Upon the sea— 

— a cross of tin set full of stones, 
And in a glasse a number of pigge's bones. 
With them more pardons daily he'd dispense. 
In one poor village would collect more pence, 
Than a poor parson lab'ring all the year. — 
He made the parson and the people fools. " 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 



began to be assailed from without by parties forced 
into unwilling schism by its own instinctive antipa- 
thies. The authority appealed to on such occasions 
was ostensibly the Bible ; but the real bases of reli- 
ance were conscience and reason, whether expressed 
mystically as an actual " indwelling of the Son of 
God," or the mind and temper supposed to be the 
consequence of such indwelling, namely the doctrine 
of faith and certainty of election inherited from St 
Paul and St Augustin. The demoralizing influence 
of the Church was not to be counteracted by partial 
reforms ; it could be cured only by such a radical 
change of theory as should displace ifcs foundations 
by transferring to morality, or rather to the soul 
itself the absolute authority w r hich the church had 
usurped ; and hence among the many insanities of 
the late Papal Allocutions,* none seem more mon- 
strous than the assumption that morality and religion 
belong exclusively to the Papal system; when in 
fact it is that very system which, by usurping the 
supremacy of conscience and placing virtue on a 
subordinate footing, as something w T hich can be dis- 
pensed with or compounded for under a superior 
authority, makes true virtue difficult or rather 
impossible. Preparations for such a transfer were 
already on foot wherever, as at the court of the 
Hohenstaufens or of Toulouse, thought obtained 
opportunities of free utterance, among the early poets 
and preachers of Germany, and also the mystics 
who preceded the Reformation, until the moral sense 
* November, 1866. 



ioo The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



hesitatingly asserted by Charron and Descartes, by 
Lntlierans, Arminians, and Socinians, became in 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Spinoza supreme. 
How different the tone of the last noble scions of 
English chivalry, Sidney or Lord Herbert, from that 
of the spiritual Quixotism of Spain ; what a contrast 
between the love of God, understood by Spinoza as 
love of truth,* and the morbid ecstasies of St Theresa, 
or even the quietism of Molinos ! Yet a long battle 
had still to be fought before the true nature of spi- 
ritual life could be generally understood. The enemy 
was no longer so much without as within ; the resist- 
ing force lay in ignorance, in the prejudices which 
clung to the skirts of supernatural revelation, and 
the cowardly hesitations of political expediency ; and 
hence a feeble and vacillating Protestantism again 
crouched under the sway of churches, which, though 
made subject to the State, and professedly based 
on ideas of progress and education, retained those 
latent germs of ecclesiasticism which were sure 
on the first favourable opportunity to swell into 
full and undisguised luxuriance. The first reawak- 
ening of freedom in modern Europe was signalized 
by vague impatience of artificial trammels, such 
as may be supposed to be indicated by the Faust 
legend,t leading to persevering but sometimes 
injudicious efforts for its outward realization. And 
although, for the purpose of a healthy moral develop- 
ment, it was before all things necessary that the 

* See the recently published ' Tractatus de Deo,' pp. 116, 156. 
t Carriere, ' Reformationszeit,' pp. 1, 2, &c. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 101 



individual soul should be emancipated from need- 
less and unnatural restraints, especially those 
fettering the exercise and expression of thought, it 
was also necessary that it should be educated, since 
its random assertion in the way of crude sentiment 
or selfish right could only betray the cause of true 
freedom by setting up the lower impulses against the 
higher. The petulancy of ignorant individualism, 
which confounds assertion and bluster with truth and 
right, was lately rebuked in the questionable form of 
a disparagement of conscience ;* conscience meaning 
here untutored individual consciousness ; and so poli- 
ticians are often found to decry principle ; partly 
because principle is apt to be practically obstruc- 
tive of political manoeuvres, but partly also 
because much passing under the name of prin- 
ciple with the individuals entertaining it is really 
only a fancy or a crotchet. Of such fancies 
Montaigne remarks! — " it is credible that there are 
laws of nature, but they are lost in us ; this fine 
human reason every where so insinuating itself as 
quite to confound the face of things." A well merited 
sarcasm in the midst of the tumultuary efforts of the 
age of the Reformation, but inapplicable now, unless 
to those who disparage knowledge because dreading 
its superiority, or in conceited levity exacting implicit 
deference to the ebullitions of caprice. So again a 
slur was cast upon the name of idealism and 
" ideology " when Rousseau, finding the genuine 

* Saturday Review, August 11, 1866. 

t 'Apology for Raymond of Sebonde, 1 p. 292 Trans. 



102 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



feelings of human brotherhood overlaid by conven- 
tional restraints, attempted to build up society anew 
on the basis of abstract individual right, since by 
this he only sowed the dragon's teeth of anarchy and 
revolution ; true freedom being the autonomy of 
reason, the divine law itself adequately learned and 
established as a preference within the soul.* 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

But reason has hard trials to undergo, it implies 
a battle to be fought in the world and in the souL 
Its inexperience is seduced by apparent good, 

Da picciol bene in pria sente sapore — 

and then, since selfish power thrives best among 
thoughtless slaves, the natural guide and good 
genius of every life, if not to be entirely extirpated, 
is artificially curbed and chained to the rock of 
custom. Reason's aspirations under these circum- 
stances are the subject of the Prometheus of iEschy- 
lus, who reveals in the form of dramatic legend the 
causes of the general incapacity to deal with the grand 
problem of autonomy, which seemed to be happily 
solved in the city where, at the public recitation of 
the words " not seeming excellence, but real is his 

* True liberty always with right reason dwells, 
Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being. 

Farad. Lost, xii. 85. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 103 



object,"* the audience rose and shouted Aristides ! 
In the drama in question the prizes of art and 
discovery are supposed to have been won,f but moral 
self-control is wanting ; power triumphs by aid of 
craft, J the master of inventive resource cannot cure 
or help himself, and so, from blind force § on one side, 
and undisciplined obstinacy on the other, there is 
nothing to hope. Themis, the parent of suffering 
reason, is under such circumstances unavoidably an 
exile ; yet not without having suggested the condi- 
tions of ultimate reconcilement, which could only be 
a better mutual understanding based on a coalition 
of power and reason, || or rather a maturer develop- 
ment of reason, of that higher humanity ^[ in which 
freedom and necessity ma} r eventually be supposed to 
coalesce.* # 

No such humanity is commonly found unless in 
exceptional cases, and it may be a problem how far, 
in the great disproportion of means to ends, a truly 
moral existence can be generally realized. But 
this does not justify the tendency of some of the 

* 'Ou yap Zqkziv 'dpiaros, a\\ eivai de\€i — 
f " Totavra y^x^v^ar a " (v. 45G.) Such wonderful discoveries and 
inventions ! 

J O'u Kar' iaxvVy SoAoj 5t. — V. 211. 

§ NeoxAtoTs vSyois Zeus aOertas Kparvvzi — 
Ilap* eavrcp 8'iKaiov Ix^ — 
'O tu)V &€o>u Tvpavvos — 
|| Toiwi/Se fioxQw iKrpon^v ouSels 0ea>v Avvair' av a.VT'cp ir\r}V 
e/xov 5ei|ai aacp&s. 
|J.&, Hercules, the foremost example of Greek virtue. 
* * riyv(ao-K€ (TOLvroVy nal fieddpfJLoacu rp6irovs veovs.—V. 307. 



104 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



cultivators of science to deny the existence of a 
moral faculty, or indeed, anything higher than 
cells and vital "collocations." In so doing, science 
is true to its own peculiar instincts, which unwil- 
lingly brook anything incapable of being seen or 
being made matter of experimental demonstration ; 
and then, as nature's ultimate reality is in this view 
only the smallest conceivable fragment or impene- 
trable atom, so man is not what he ought to be, but 
what he empirically is, namely, an irrational force 
naturally hostile to his fellows. # The only treatment 
suited to him in such a theory is some peremptory 
external force, through which he escapes from false 
semblances of liberty to the humbler but safer con- 
dition of political equality ; this being maintained 
either compnlsorily or by voluntary artificial balances 
of constitutionalism. These last, however, are only 
a temporary expedient, a state of transition to some- 
thing better or worse ; the sole ultimate stay of 
unreclaimed irrational selfishness is tyranny, in 
which the capricious freedom of the " rights of man " 
invariably returns to a redoubling of restraint, — 
y Apao"(T€ fJLaWov, crcpiyye, fXTj^afxij — f 

The theory of secular politics, inherited by Hobbes 
from Machiavelli and the Jesuits, was obviously 
incomplete ; it required, in addition to municipal and 
legal control, some supplementary educational disci- 

* "A good man," said King Comaro (in Sir S. Baker's Travels) "is 
one who is not strong enough to be bad." 

t Tighten the cord, allow him not an inch. 

Prometheus, v. 58. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 105 



pline to direct irrational impulse ; and no such influ- 
ence being spontaneously and naturally forthcoming, 
artificial authority, especially that of churches, obtained 
a plausible pretext for re occupying the vacant place. 
" The most inordinately selfish men are often the 
most superstitious ; instinctively aware that reason 
cannot help them to their objects, they denounce this 
highest of all gifts as incapable and profane, and resort 
rather to tears, prayers, and every sort of puerility."* 
In the stress of immediate want, the inveterate 
abuses and proved incompetency of churches are for- 
gotten ; the divine right disowned in civil govern- 
ment, revives in ecclesiastical ; the ground half won 
from theology by Grotius and others is reoccupied by 
the Coryphaei of legitimist reaction ;f force and fear, 
represented by the hangman and the priest, are 
hailed as saviours of society, and a church routine, 
only the more noxious for its moral professions, effec- 
tually undermines morality by discountenancing 
freedom. " The poet who said that man loses half his 
virtue on the first day of slavery, had witnessed only 
the consequences of civil or domestic slavery ; he 
could not foresee how the second moiety of manhood 
would be annihilated by spiritual despotism, which 
shackles not only action but thought. "J And it is 
curious to observe how the absence of that paramount 
authority which even in Protestantism was still 

* Spinoza, Preface to 'Theol. Polit.' 

t E.g.. Stahl and De Maistre, the author of the • Genie du Chris- 
tianism,' and that of the ' Essai sur r Indifference en matiere de Religion. ' 
% Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall,' ch. xlviii. 



io6 The Eternal Gospel; cr> the 



retained by church religion, embarrassed the inquiry 
into the nature and principles of morality ; how that 
which had all along been the real strength of the 
Deists in their controversies with tradition, only 
towards the close of the eighteenth century began to 
be thoroughly understood, and to receive the absolute 
homage which was due to it. A Protestant church 
belying its proper foundations by disparaging reason* 
and encouraging reactionary superstitions, is in many 
respects worse than the unmasked pretensions of 
Rome ; the enemy being here within the gates, and 
the infatuated votary cajoled by the idea of combin- 
ing the indolent securities and embellishments of the 
old system with the material advantages and elastic 
opportunities of the new. With an education 
thwarted by such influences, there can be no end of 
mental slavery, and its political results in an unhappy 
oscillation between indolent routine and demoralizing 
tyranny ; the latter being practically brought nearer 
not only at each conspicuous exemplification of the 
feebleness of constitutional administration, but when- 
ever moral principles are publicly violated, or indivi- 
dual rights imprudently and recklessly asserted. 

Natural law generally occurs under two aspects, — 
as a product of authority or of reason, — as embodied 
in written statutes or as unwritten ; and hence two 
schools or methods of investigating it, the empirical 
or historical, and the philosophical or ideal. The 

* " Only despise reason, man's highest privilege, only permit thyself 
to be confirmed in delusion and sorcery work by the spirit of lies, and 

I have thee unconditionally," says Mephistopheles in Faust. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 107 



former seeks what is universally fit and right in 
what experience shows to be so ; the other looks 
directly to nature, especially human nature, and 
all science and philosophy may be considered as 
helping to interpret it.* All law to be available 
must be somehow subjectively formulated and studied 
in its practical relations, and abstract undisciplined 
speculation leads only to Utopianism ; yet merely 
empirical inferences are necessarily inconclusive, 
since positive law is in great measure the creature of 
circumstance, generally long outlasting the occasion 
which gave it birth. The great complication and 
variety of empirical laws render it very difficult 
to distinguish the special and transient elements 
in them from the eternal and universal, so as to 
have even suggested a doubt as to the existence 
of any immutable rule at all. Human provisions 
cannot include what is just and proper in all 
cases ;t though starting from true perceptions 
originally, the truth and consequently the deduced 
rule is inevitably relative and partial ; the wants 
of life cannot be anticipated by statutes, its in- 
equalities requiring from time to time corresponding 
legal adjustments. "I know the nature of this 
science of jurisprudence," says the Spirit in Faust ; 
" laws descend like an inveterate hereditary disease ; 
reason becomes nonsense, beneficence a farce." Even 
the certainty which writing at first seemed to secure 

* Non a prsetoris edicto, neque a XII. Tabulis, sed ex intima philo- 
sophic haurienda est juris disciplina.— Cicero de Legg. i. 5. 
t Plato, 'Politicus,' ch. 34. 



io8 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



is really jeopardized by it, written definition giving 
to ill intent opportunities of evasion, so that Zaleucus 
compared written laws to spiders' webs, which catch 
small flies, but suffer larger ones to pass. The best 
laws, says Montaigne, " are ever the simplest." 
Human laws try to overtake varieties of action by 
multitudinous enactments, until at last the remedy 
becomes more intolerable than the complaint ;* and 
" they are but fools," he adds,t " who try to stop 
debate by appealing to the express words of the 
Bible;" since interpretation is as precarious as 
language, and ingenuity finds quite as large a 
field in controverting the interpretations of ano- 
ther as in establishing its own. An external 
code falls short of special exigencies and fails 
for want of flexibility ; it is a hard taskmaster, 
leading life with the hand of death, dictating to the 
will without conciliating it, and enforcing obedience 
without producing virtue. And this unreasoning 
rigidity is more especially noxious in the case of 
Church legislation, because here the pressure reaches 
the conscience and thoughts, uncorrected error be- 
coming the object of a disastrous worship, until in 
the descending scale of infatuation the idiocy of a 
belief is considered as a test of its sublimity, J 
and the caprices of ecclesiastical millinery are 
mistaken for divine institutions. The law given 

* " Ut olim flagitiis, nunc legibus laboramus." 

+ Essay on Experience, near the commencement — an early anticipation 
of the absurdities of Bibliolatry ! 
J " Credibile quia ineptum."— -Tertullian de carne Christi, ch. v. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 109 



out as divine by churches always has more or less of 
an arbitrary artificial character ; and their method of 
administering it, by casuistically assorting its decrees 
and dispensing with its penalties, tends to make the 
obligation which is really entire and absolute into 
something partial, subordinate, and conditional. Re- 
ligious dogmas, too, are a sort of ecclesiastical legis- 
lation, which, like other laws, once had a basis of 
truth, and which often enjoy even a greater extent of 
irrational longevity than other laws, because inter- 
fering less than others with common life, and because 
when obsolete in the ordinary sense they may be 
made to revive as symbols of some latent and ideally 
justifiable meaning, like the cargo of warming-pans 
said to have been exported during the great specula- 
tive mania some forty years ago to Chili in South 
America, which, when found useless for the originally 
intended purpose, were ultimately made available as 
stew-pans. 

Ideal law alone fulfils all requirements as being 
absolutely faultless, inflexible, inaccessiWe to caprice, 
and when discovered always adequate to the occa- 
sion. The difficulty is in finding it ; when found, 
whether in nature or in the soul, it is universally 
as well as individually binding, indeed the ultimate 
criterium of all law, and also the truest test of the 
integrity of the will itself. Being essentially spiritual 
it reaches the depths of motive, and is well described 
in the Bible* as piercing the joints and marrow, and 
as having the singular property of " restoring " or 
* Hebrews, eh. iv. 12 ; Psalms xix. 7, with Hupf eld's Commentary. 



no The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



converting the soul ; for it restores man to his true 
nature ; its provisions react as privileges, and so tend 
to secure their own fulfilment.* It was unfortunate 
that even subsequent to the time of Grotius the 
notion of divine law continued to be confused with 
that of human, in the sense of a set rule penally en- 
forced by a superior; and this chiefly because, according 
to the then prevalent notions about God as transcen- 
dental legislator, it would otherwise have seemed to be 
something independent of, or even superior to Him.f 
The worst consequence of this error was the 
severance of natural law from ethics, and a mis- 
conception of its intrinsic excellence ; making duty 

* " The common opinion of men," says Spinoza (Eth., Bk. V., prop. 41 
schol.), "is that they are free so far as they are at liberty to gratify their 
inclinations, and that obedience to the divine law is a relinquishment of 
their rights. Hence they treat piety, religion, and everything requiring 
self-control as a burthen which they hope to get rid of at death, when 
they may obtain the reward of their prior constraint. But for hopes and 
fears of a future state they would follow natural inclination, and lead a 
life of passion or accident. This is as absurd as if one perceiving that by 
eating good food he cannot prolong life eternally should therefore feed on 
poisons." 

t Grotius himself through deference for revelation is led to countenance 
this notion. See De Jure B. Prolegom. s. 11, 12, 13 — and Cocceiis note, 
" Contradictoria sunt jus esse neque tamen superiorem." See, too, 
Puffendorfs 'Law of Nations,' Introduction, sect. i. and vi., and Bk. I. 
II. vi. Locke, in his Essay (ii. 28, s. vi. and viii.) and elsewhere, does 
not scruple to assert that good and ill are only pleasure and pain, that 
the sole touchstone of moral rectitude is the consideration whether a 
certain course of action is likely to procure happiness or misery from 
the arbitrary will of the Almighty. 

The utilitarian treatment of law as a means for mechanically securing 
an isolated circle of selfish right to each individual, eventually estranged 
the departments of law and ethics more and more until they became 
opposed, law itself becoming endangered or subverted in consequence of 
oblivion of its ethical foundations. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 1 1 1 



into mere slavish submission to a given rule, 
whose moral contents were at any moment liable 
to be confounded, as in the familiar instance of the 
fourth commandment, with arbitrary ecclesiastical 
ordinances of a conventional kind. In order to re- 
unite religion and morality, and to eradicate slavery 
with superstition, there was wanted a profounder 
conception of law as founded in the very being of 
God ;* and this, as enunciated by Charron, Cud- 
worth, or Spinoza, was but a return to that highest 
achievement of Greek and Roman civilization, con- 
sisting in the idealization of law as something rooted 
in nature, a rule existing antecedently to any human 
discoveries and written registrations of it, and which 
man can only evade by deserting and injuring him- 
self, f " The spring and source of mental integrity," 
says Charron,J "is the law of nature; by which I 
mean that universal equity and reason which shines 
in each of us ; he who acts according to it acts accord- 
ing to God, for it is a ray of that eternal law which is 
God Himself. He who adheres to this principle is 
his own rule ; for he acts according to the noblest 

* " What were a God who outward force applying, 
But kept the All around his finger flying ! 
He rather from within all nature moves, 
Nature in Him, Himself in nature loves ; 
So that what in Him lives, and moves, and is, 
Still feels his power and owns itself as His.' 1 — Goetltc. 
t Cicero De Legibus, ii. 4, and De Repub., quoted in Lactantius. 
" To say there is nothing just or unjust, except what positive law com- 
mands and forbids, is the same, ,, says Montesquieu, "as saying that 
before describing a circle all the radii were not equal. 1 ' 
X De la Sagesse, Bk. III., ch. iii. 



1 1 2 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



part of his nature. His honesty is inseparable from 
him ; he will do right constantly and at all times. 
The law of nature is invariable ; wickedness itself 
cannot deface it. The inferences made about it differ, 
but the first principles remain the same : ' Quod petis 
intus habes ;' all the rules and laws which have any 
where obtained in the world are but transcripts from 
the original which virtually we possess within our- 
selves. " 

The want of our day, says a recent writer on juris- 
prudence,^ is a theory which shall reunite morality 
with genuine legality ; and while retaining the advan- 
tage of an objective rule, shall combine with it the 
Platonic and Christian conception of internal or 
intrinsic goodness, bringing the duly apprehended 
law into intimate connection with all the circum- 
stances and relations of life. Nature anticipates 
the requirement by supplying a rule everywhere 
effectually present and incapable of infringement, f 
yet having no separate place or prescriptive form 
apart from the beings amenable to it and existing 
through its agency. Whether it be called will or 
thought, natural causality or moral causality, or 
something beyond and superior to both, J or else a 
blending of both, as expressed by the idea of purpose 

* Dr Ahrens, ' Juristische Encyclopaedic,' pp. 66, 144, 181. 

t This quality of essential inviolability is treated by Spinoza (De Deo, 
p. 214) as the essential characteristic of divine law; the passage may be 
recommended to the attention of those too ardent advocates of freedom 
who lately taught the contrary at Cambridge. 

X As, for instance, Spinoza, Schelling, and others place will and 
thought in the "natura naturata,"— subsequent to the natura naturans. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 113 



or design, seems comparatively unimportant, pro- 
vided it be understood as the living energy which 
constitutes not only the essences of things, but their 
necessary relations ; attaining its end, not througi 1 
extraneous superadded penalties and inducements, 
but immediately and by itself. The behaviour of the 
conscious subjects of such a rule will be neither inertly 
submissive nor dreamily Utopian 3 it will be the care- 
fully measured choice of the best available reason, 
making it of little ulterior moment whether greater 
prominence be theoretically assigned to the idea of 
freedom or that of duty, when it is recollected that 
the law pervading external nature reigns also in us, 
being, in fact, homogeneous with the faculty enabling 
us to appropriate and comprehend it. And hence 
some have described morality by a formula inter- 
mediate between freedom and necessity, or between 
benevolence and self-love, calling it concurrency of 
will, ideal justice or harmony ; these terms being well 
suited to express what should be kept in view in 
the efforts of imperfect beings to approach the mea- 
sure of the perfect.'-' Kant, whose aim, like that of 
St Paul, was an advance from artificial legalism to 
moral freedom, has been censured for retaining law 
as a moral principle, because seemingly implying 
external compulsion ; yet it will not so appear if the 

* Hence in the Platonic Republic comparatively little is said about 
freedom and duty, these being absorbed in the higher idea of "justice " 
or harmony; and hence, too, the ruthless subordination of the individual 
to the general, absurd as it may seem in some of Plato's actual applica- 
tions, as well as in some of the instances given in the New Testament, 
becomes a self-evident necessity. 

I 



114 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



nature of ideal law be carefully kept in view, this 
being no other than divine wisdom,* or the 
true light directing while it serves, and which alone 
empowers the soul to choose by distinguishing 
between truth and falsehood, good and bad. But since 
no law is practically available until known, it becomes 
necessary to study the law as given in nature, espe- 
cially that of human nature, manifested in those 
aptitudes and capacities which, while affording some 
insight into its ulterior destinies, are all important 
in determining the conditions of actual well-being. 
Chief among these is its ideal faculty or power of 
continually rising above itself, which forms the foun- 
dation of its healthily progressive development in 
communion with the world and with society ; the 
latter affording means of realizing collectively for 
the general advantage a number of perfections which 
could not have been had separately. And hence 
Plato's republic is a scheme of social education 
founded on an anthropological theory, suggesting the 
means of regulating individual impulse according to 
the true requirements of the general. The ideal can 
be appropriately dealt with only by education ; and 

* Nee illud ambigendum est, incommutabilem illam naturam quae 
supra rationalem animam sit Deum esse ; et ibi esse priinam vitam et 
primam essentiam ubi est prima sapientia, Haec est ilia incommutabilis 
Veritas quae lex omnium recte dicitur, et ars omnipotentis Artificis." — 
Augustin de Vera Religione, ch. xxxi. A similar sentiment takes 
a characteristically different form in Spinoza's twenty-first Letter 
to Oldenburg: "Non necesse est Christum secundum carnem noscere; 
sed de aeterno illo filio Dei, hoc est, Dei seterna sapientia, quae sese 
in omnibus rebus, et maxime in mente humana, et omnium maxime 
in Christo manifestavit, longe aliter sentiendum." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 115 



this is accordingly treated by Plato as the grand 
essential, without which the best laws are valueless, 
and with which even their absence may be said to be 
unfelt. The selfish theories forming the basis of 
modern politics are obviously incapable of supporting 
a moral superstructure ; not so those based on bene- 
volence, or on a full and fair estimate of all the 
capacities of human nature. The social instinct 
mainly relied on in this view by Grrotius appears 
in earliest infancy, when the inconveniently im- 
patient manifestations of incipient free will are 
counterbalanced by the awakening of friendly sen- 
timent, seen in smiling recognition of the mother 
and of the other inmates of the house. Even at this 
early stage the child is not quite an egoist ; if not 
injudiciously spoiled, — i. e., gratified in each unreason- 
able wish, so as to remain the slave of impulse and 
so continuously childish, it becomes more and more 
self- disciplined, and this through attachment rather 
than fear, until the growth of reason, accompanying 
the growth of the passions which it has to control, 
carries on the lesson more independently and com- 
pletely. The basis of character is thus laid, and 
sentiments of temperance, benevolence, and justice 
deliberately adopted and incorporated in heart and 
memory, appear as the spontaneous manifestations 
of human nature. Even that portion of the law 
which, being derived from outward nature, seems at 
first to wear an aspect of necessity, is yet so far 
spontaneous, inasmuch as it is not really learned 
until it has become assimilated and incorporated as 



1 1 6 The Eternal Gospel; or> the 



the internal construction of oar own intelligence. 
For the lesson learned from nature is always, in great 
measure, half taught. It consists of formulas which, 
though bearing the impress of the outward world, 
are really contrivances of the mind to fit certain 
groups of phenomena in order to make them man- 
ageable and intelligible ; these, after being submitted 
to analysis, fall under new mental combinations, 
until, by reiterated reparation and mental recon- 
struction, they reach a stage in which they are hailed 
as laws of nature, or as science. All knowledge 
implies a more or less perfect identification of the 
mind with the object known, and the solution of a 
problem consists in the mental actualization or recog- 
nition of its contained possibilities, so that even here 
the mind is architect and generator of its own truth,* 
and may be said to be essentially the ideas acquired 
through its own activity. In the process of knowing 
we build up an ideal world within ourselves, the 
activities of our intellects accompanying so far the 
energy of the divine, this being in fact one of the 
highest exercises of freedom. Nor are scientific 
men now usually misled by false notions of finality 
or the obstinacy of theories ; and they who take up 
with the first rude generalizations, passively adopting 
the opinions habitually repeated in their hearing, 
cling to them with a confidence unknown to the philo- 
sopher, who holds his opinions loosely because often 

* Plato's Repub., vi. p. 490.— The reason why the problem is so 
solved, says Aristotle (Metaph. ix. 9, Schwegler's Edition), is that the 
act of intelligence is essentially energy. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 1 1 7 



finding them to be erroneous, and always expecting 
to have them questioned. By means of formulas 
thus obtained and verified, the vague sense of right 
is furnished with a practically reliable set of rules 
standing on a basis of necessity ; yet at the same 
time exercising an emancipating influence, because 
self-recommended and self-imposed, and empowering 
the will to exercise a wholesome choice. 



CHRISTIAN MORALITY (SO CALLED). 

It was said by a late eminent painter, if you wish 
to see the faults of your picture, get some one to copy 
it ; and so, excellences being always less apt to grow 
under the hands of the copyist than blemishes, the 
true nature of morality is best seen by comparing it 
with spurious imitations. Christianity was truly 
termed the " salt of the earth," as being an essen- 
tially moral movement, a mental purification so far 
as its influence went ; yet it was only a small light 
in great darkness ; and reactionary darkness nearly 
effaced the feeble light, destroying all that was 
genuine in Christianity except the name. Corruption 
obtained entrance through the weaker parts of its 
theoretical foundation, such as its estrangement from 
the world,its craving for independence and universality, 
and its blind attachment to a person.* E strange - 

* "The old world,"' says Cariyle, "knew nothing of conversion ; it 
knew nothing of ' Ecce Homo,' but it had the choice of Hercules.'''' 



1 1 8 The Eternal Gospel ; or, the 



ment from the world not only restricted its area to 
narrow limits, but gave it a peculiar character of asceti- 
cal austerity while on the other hand the desire for 
extension and universalism generated a spirit of 
worldly compliance which in the church took pre- 
cedence of all other considerations. Nominal 
Christendom thus became sundered into two con- 
trasted spheres which long continued to confront one 
another under the names of a "lower " and a " higher 
virtue ;" the former shared by the Church with the 
general world which it strove to govern by a policy 
of concession and conciliation ; the other practised 
exceptionally and for the most part in monastic 
seclusion by a certain class, yet after all not securing 
true virtue, but only a stricter form of external 
discipline. The essence of Christianity was freedom, 
which in the absence of a clearly defined rule was 
apt to fall into licentiousness ; the essence of the 
Church was discipline, which both in its secular and 
monastic forms subverted freedom but failed to secure 
virtue. So that the catastrophe of heathen Rome in 
the falling to pieces of a highly artificial administrative 
machinery for want of moral power and integrity 
within had to be repeated ; like some splendid 
suit of armour in an antiquarian repository, which 
having no man inside it a child may upset. And the 
failure was all the more disastrous in the case of the 
church, because the inner life was the ostensible 
aim of ecclesiastical government ; and this, betrayed 

* Tertullian's only resource in the conflict of apparent duties is 
;t Exeundum erit de s^eculo. 1 '— De Idol. ch. xxiv. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 119 



and ruined by its hollow pretences and manipula- 
tions, it left after all to be built up anew from the 
foundations by its rough-handed secular antagonists. 

Plato had treated his ideal "Republic" or social 
state, constructed on principles of perfect '''justice" 
or harmony, as the true moral educator, and the 
Church gladly adopted this theory with its logical 
consequences of an arbitrary subjection of individuals 
to general interests ; only it interpreted Plato's ideal 
universalism in the sense of a special universalism of 
its own, employing its extensive, though happily 
limited, dominion, not so much to fit men for hap- 
piness in another world, as to make them the blind 
instruments of its selfish ambition in this. By its 
creeds obscuring the nature of truth, its supernatural 
graces intercepting the free conscience, and its dis- 
cipline confounding the sense of right by a routine of 
outward observance, it was well calculated, if not to 
make men good, at all events to drill them into 
obedience ; it secured a deceptive peace by quieting- 
perplexing anxieties, and assuring the startled con- 
science of its own unqualified power to renovate and 
save. A partial shifting of the moral area and trans- 
ference of view from the actual to those future 
penalties and rewards supposed to be controlled and 
administered by the Church, weakened the force of 
present . duty, and tended to supersede individual 
effort and responsibility. It was these essentially 
demoralising pretensions which produced the mental 
alienation leading to its decline. The Church 
could not promote virtue because it annihilated 



120 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



freedom, and because it usurped the position of 
sovereignty belonging to virtue alone. No obligation 
was so absolute under such a system but that it 
might be dispensed with or replaced by some 
substitutive act performed under Church authority ; 
no vice so repulsive but that its guilt might be 
excused or refined away by qualifying considerations. 
But the sense of virtue is lost when it ceases to be 
paramount, when its one and indivisible imperative is 
undermined by the multiplication of special definitions 
and subdivisions, withdrawing attention from the 
absolute obligation of the whole to fix it on relative 
ecclesiastical determinations as to the parts. Similar 
results followed from the distinction of a higher and 
a lower virtue, one considered to be within all men's 
reach, the other only to be expected from a particular 
class ; the higher scale of merit theoretically contem- 
plated in such a system turning out, in fact, to be 
only a formal sanctity more or less easily evaded ; the 
lower an accommodation to existiug practices, soon 
losing all pretension to be a moral discipline at all. 

The scholastic theory of morals, as given in its 
most finished form by Aquinas, ostensibly contains 
within it all the elements of truth, only they are so 
sundered and assorted as to lose their proper value ; 
the result being that natural morality is compressed 
into a feeble unsatisfactory episode hemmed in on all 
sides by ecclesiastical ; everything giving a character 
of absoluteness to obligation, in regard to its rule, 
reward, and ability to discharge it, — is transferred to 
a higher sphere outside the moral subject, remaining 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 121 



ultimately with the Church ; and to the unassisted 
faculty is left only the relative morality which even 
if " formaliter " right is constantly liable from mis- 
taken views of good to go " materialiter " wrong. It 
is characteristic that Aquinas places Aristotle's 
highest virtue, namely, wisdom, among supernatural 
" gifts " or graces, omitting it among the intellectual 
virtues ; so that the best of these is only prudence or 
worldly dexterity. 

With the revival of freedom at the Reformation 
natural morality reasserted its claims ; yet, unless in a 
few exceptional instances, it remained shorn of its 
true proportions, bereft of the indispensable " impera- 
tive " which had been monopolized by the church. 
And the continuance of church influences in Protes- 
tantism caused continuing embarrassment as to its 
nature, which was clear only to those who, like Bruno 
or Spinoza, were vulgarly imagined in their abandon- 
ing of churches to have quitted Christianity itself. 
The want of a principle large enough to vindicate the 
sincerity and to embrace the totality of the moral life 
as against the political conventionalism of Hobbes was 
keenly felt ; several vaguely conflicting theories de- 
vised for this object, each embracing a part of the 
truth, but incomplete in itself, stood arrayed against 
each other ; while, on the other hand, the same 
narrowness which made politics into a mere equipoise 
of rights, forces, or utilities, treated virtue and vice 
also on a mechanical and mercantile footing. And 
when, repelled by views of this description, Cumber- 
land in one form and Hutcheson and Hume in another 



122 The Eternal Gospel; or, thi 



endeavoured to give a sounder basis to morals by 
seeking some internal motive which, whether called 
reason, or moral sense, or sympathy, tended more and 
more to be regarded as a fundamental and paramount 
condition of human nature, theologians endeavoured 
to recover their waning authority over the moral life, 
either by the usual ecclesiastical machinery, or else by 
asserting for Christian morality a specific and unique 
character differing from ordinary morality, and purer 
than any other. The former mode of proceeding 
was the demoralizing process with which we are 
familiar, and its success was greatly assisted by the low 
standards of secular moral theory which have been 
lately prevalent, reducing the notion of right to little 
more than vague sentiment or calculating self-asser- 
tion mistaking itself for freedom. Other theologians 
endeavoured to set up a specific morality within 
Christianity ; yet it is hard to see how the Christian 
conscience can be bound by duties or entitled to 
exemptions which are not equally open or 
obligatory for the natural. A peculiar set of 
acts enjoined in the name of Christianity will be 
found to be either something unnaturally misleading, 
or else identical with those which are right uni- 
versally. Schleiermacher's great principle is feeling ; 
but since personal feeling must always be vague and 
uncertain, he refers for explanatory details to the 
customs and traditions of the church. Then arises 
the dilemma of the empirical or the ideal church ; if 
the former be meant, Christian morals must be 
swayed by historical contingencies ; if the latter, 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility* 1 23 



nothing is to be found beyond what ordinary morality 
enjoins. Schleiermacher's central idea of " the feeling 
of redemption " is anticipated, so far as it has a 
meaning, by natural ethics ; and the sentiment 
attached to it of "joy in the Lord "is a lure which, 
honestly expounded, implies only the sentiment of a 
higher nature and the satisfaction of a good con- 
science. His apology for ceremonial worship as a 
representative act or interval of " realized bliss " is 
somewhat unfortunate, nor can more be said for his 
special explanation of marriage, on the score of the 
expansive tendencies of the Christian spirit ; so that 
the peculiarity of " Christian Ethics" will be found 
to consist chiefly in the appeal to sentiment to accept 
nominal differences as real ones, or accessories as 
essentials ; in the adopting an asceticism no longer 
desirable, or traditional notions which are no longer 
tenable. 



MORAL MAXIMS. 

It was a noble and, in many respects, a just 
thought to treat virtue as a whole, and to identify it 
with knowledge ; yet the position is strictly true only 
of ideal knowledge, or of that highest sphere in which 
absolute wisdom and goodness guarantee one another. 
So that when Socrates urged the equivalency of 
virtue and knowledge, because no one knowing the 
good deliberately chooses evil, he said that which 
though ideally true is practically misleading, because 



124 The Eternal Gospel; or y the 



human notions of good are often fallacious, and even 
he himself was so far compelled to look in his doc- 
trinal applications to opinion and utility, that how- 
ever theoretically different, his ethics often practically 
swerve in the direction of the sophistical. And hence 
Plato and Aristotle in ancient, like Bacon in recent 
times, were led to see that the aim of ethics should 
be, not only the science of the good, but the training 
of the will ; that virtue has its preparatory stages 
and subordinate degrees, its real acquisition being 
slow and laborious ; that what commonly passes for 
virtue is something capricious in its manifestations 
and precarious in its duration, as being founded on no 
fixed principle ; or, if it have an ostensible principle, 
only on that uncertain one of utility which lies 
outside the moral subject, and which may be inter- 
preted either virtuously or selfishly. And hence the 
radical incompatibility of the Platonic ethics with those 
of the Sophist or public teacher, who acquiesced in the 
opinions of the multitude, and contentedly accepted 
the received utilitarian standard as sufficient and 
conclusive. These mercenary teachers, says Plato,* 
flatter vulgar opinion by complimentary repetitions 
of its own ideas, just as if one studying the caprices 
of some powerful monster in his keeping should call 
the results of the inquiry wisdom, and then, forming 
them into an art should open a school, teaching for 
wisdom the mere stupid preferences of the huge 
animal which it is his object to conciliate. A simi- 
larly ignoble mission i$ often performed in modern 
* •Repub.,' vL p. 493. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 125 



days by the press, one of whose foremost English 
organs recently deprecated originality in public 
speakers, on the ground that " if too original 
they must inevitably disappoint the hearer or reader, 
who expects to listen only to the ordinary recognized 
views, and to have his own opinions pleasantly re- 
flected back to him from the mouth of another."* 
But the most mischievous sophist is unquestionably 
the churchman, who betrays his attributive cha- 
racter of sanctity by " lying in the name of the Lord," 
and mechanically repeating opinions and formularies 
with which he has no sympathy, f This is the true 
modern exemplification of the sophist, one making, 
not ideally perfectible man, but empirical ill-edu- 
cated humanity the measure or standard of truth, 
and repeating in eloquent harangues from a thousand 
pulpits the soothing assurance that self-complacent 
prejudice is right, and innovating sincerity mistaken. 
The Church distinction of a higher and lower virtue 
had a very different meaning and moral bearing from 
the corresponding distinction in Plato, the former 
being based on ascetical theory and the creation of 
an ascetically aristocratic order rather than on the 
natural aristocracy of education ; the inferior virtue 
of the Church being awarded to a distinct class of 
persons for whom under its own all-powerful aegis 
it was to be considered as sufficient ; whereas in 

* The Times of December 6, 1862. 

t The following text may be recommended as appropriate to the 
times : " The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their 
means ; and my people love to have it so ; but what will ye do in the 
end?"— Jerem. v. 31. 



126 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



Plato, as also in the unregenerate " following " of 
the fourth Gospel, it is but a vacillating initiative 
inadequate in itself, if indeed from its fugitive 
and uncertain nature it deserve the name of virtue 
at all. 

All morality requires an honestly rational adjust- 
ment, a well-considered regard to persons and circum- 
stances ; and those who, after Socrates, identified it 
with knowledge at least escaped the error of supposing 
it to be something essentially spontaneous and easy. 
The diversities of appreciation adduced by Montaigne 
and others in disproof of a universal or immutable 
morality are quite relevant in regard to crude know- 
ledge or ill-educated sentiment, and Rousseau must 
be admitted to have been as one-sided in his reliance 
on mere sentiment^ as others have been in decrying- 
it. The will requires to be trained in order to raise 
it from the empirical to the moral condition ; and this 
training will consist not only in the acquisition of 
just estimates of outward good, but in its own purifi- 
cation and rectification ; for the will has an internal 
law of its own, which, though unwritten and unseen, 
is at any time susceptible of being provisionally for- 
mulated and expressed as its regulating maxims. All 
phases of disposition admit of being stated as maxims, 
from the self-denying virtue of Christianity down to 
the selfish characteristics of La Rochefoucauld ; and 
this is indeed the great difference between moral 
principles and maxims of conduct, that the former are 

* As where lie calls reason a " triste privilege de m'egarer d'erreurs 

en erreurs." 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 127 



eternal and universal, the latter what Montaigne 
terms u municipal/' i. e., practical forms and 
subjective appropriations of the other. And hence 
the utility of those general aphorisms or practical 
rules which have been handed down as approved by- 
experience to assist the memory and form the dis- 
position. They are provisional recapitulations of the 
law expressed in terse emphatic language for private 
use ; and although conduct is always more immediately 
dependent on general character and impulse than 
abstract reflection about principles, still it seems a 
gross exaggeration to say that such maxims are 
wholly valueless. # Gnomic wisdom was the earliest 
form of moral philosophy, and is still the most appro- 
priate form of teaching it to the many, on whom more 
elaborate lessons would be lost. Brief abstracts of 
this kind once accepted by reason and treasured in 
memory, contribute more or less to the formation of 
character, exercising an influence long after it can be 
distinctly traced ;t and though in action one may not 
recall Cicero or Seneca, or repeat Hamlet's soliloquies, 
still the familiarising the mind with noble thoughts 
helps to originate and strengthen right tendencies. 
."Jus aliquando dormit, moritur nunquam," is as true 
of the internal influences of law within the soul as of 
the judicial administration of it ; assimilated by reason 
it becomes a part of ourselves, openly or obscurely 
reacting against evil propensities, and often by 

* See ' Miscellaneous Kemains of Archbishop Whately,' p. 88. 
t " Studies," says Bacon, "enter the manners, and so do conversation, 
the laws," &c. 



128 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



causing outbreaks of remorse leading to moral reno- 
vation . 

A rule applying to few cases only, or liable to 
many exceptions, proportionately loses its value ; on 
the other hand, one uniting definiteness with absolute 
universality is not to be had ; and many of the most 
unexceptionable maxims, as, e.g., to speak the truth 
always, and not to do evil that good may come, require 
large discretion in their use. Maxims should there- 
fore be as comprehensive as possible, while always 
held subject to revision and individual discretion 
in their application. In order to assist comprehen- 
sion and to avoid the vagueness and generality of 
" the moral law," Kant had recourse to the maxim 
above cited, — " act so that the maxims of your con- 
duct may be suitable for a universal legislation " ; — 
which, however, is only to say, Let your conduct be 
in the best possible harmony with universal justice, 
amounting only to a slightly varying repetition of 
the moral imperative itself. So, again, when in 
order to avoid the possibly utilitarian application of 
the former rule, he added another — " obey the law 
because of the law, or because it is right, and 
not from fear of consequences," he in fact only 
describes the moral disposition, exhibiting the same 
thing from a different point of view. And, indeed, 
it is impossible to legislate effectually for the 
will without endangering the basis of all morality, 
namely, freedom. Casuistry would fain guide the 
submissive will by means of a network of rules 
suited to all conceivable emergencies ; but in en- 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 129 



forcing the acted signs and outward semblances of 
goodness it loses the essence, the complexity of its 
rules producing a bewildering subserviency making 
true morality impossible. Yet a plea for this system 
has lately been heard from various quarters ; Dr 
Newman in his ' Apologia/ though not enthusiastically 
in favour of casuistry, expressing a wish that legis- 
lators and politicians would define beforehand the 
cases in which falsehood should not be considered 
lying ; and Dr Whately, in the above- quoted essay, 
repeating the sentiment — " It would be better," he 
says, " to lay down the maxims so modified as to be 
true in practice. " " To speak the downright truth," 
lately said a popular journal, "is to hurt somebody's 
feelings ; and to do this is an offence against good 
taste ; how advantageous, then, would it be to have 
the cases marked out in which falsehood should be 
held to be allowable, and a particular allegation to 
be altogether unimportant and unmeaning " ! Such 
advocacy of systematic subterfuge can only be con- 
sidered as an evidence of moral decline, since in 
moral questions the essential thing is the inten- 
tion, which no special definitions reach ; and the 
endeavour to find a substitute in arbitrary provi- 
sions of law for free responsibility betrays the latent 
conviction that this, with the judicial discretion 
which it assumes in individual minds, is held to be 
virtually non-existent. Its decay is the inevitable 
consequence of ecclesiastical and sectarian teaching. 
" While parties of men cram their tenets down the 
throats of all whom they get into their power, and 

K 



130 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



will not let truth have fair play in the world, what 
improvement can be expected, what greater light 
hoped for, in the moral sciences ? The greater part 
of mankind might instead thereof, with Egyptian 
darkness expect Egyptian bondage, were it not for 
the candle of the Lord set up by Himself in men's 
minds, which it is impossible for the breath or power 
of man wholly to extinguish." 5 * 5 



THE MORAL IDEAS. 

Moral maxims may be regarded as a sort of laws, 
but laws susceptible of inward assimilation and 
administration, and assisting, not superseding indi- 
vidual discretion. Their excellence consists in a 
quality the very opposite of that conferring superio- 
rity on ordinary laws, which are best, says Bacon,f 
when leaving least to the discretion of the judge. 
Their aim is a nearer specification of that important 
part of the general law which, being seated within 
the soul, more especially deserves the name of moral ; 
but since the best maxims are the most general, and 
generality implies vagueness, it may be well not to 
overlook other sorts of teaching or illustration serving 
to purify or strengthen moral principle. The best 
instructor of early life is example ; for virtue as well 
as vice is contagious, love and admiration being imme- 



* Locke's Essay, 4, 3, 20. 



t De Augm. 8, 3, 10. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility, 131 



diately appealed to, and the judgment of the wise is 
the readiest criterium of good to those incapable of 
judging for themselves. Poetry and art too powerfully 
influence imperfectly educated sentiment, and the 
former has been termed philosophy teaching by 
example, a teaching far more effectual, at least to 
the majority of men, than the dry lessons of Chry sip- 
pus and Crantor. It is the earliest self-educating 
manifestation of creative intellect, which though inter- 
mingling light with shade and truth with fiction, 
really has truth only for its object,* enfranchising the 
soul by means of the ideal, while teaching it the 
salutary discipline of religion.f Yet its ethical 
aptitudes have been questioned, owing to its ten- 
dency to stoop to the popular level, and the mis- 
cellaneous character of its ingredients, so that the 
very circumstances most calculated to extend its 
influence are apt to impair its usefulness. Hence 
Plato and Augustin banish poetry from their " divine 
cities," and Zwingli, followed by Puritan feeling 

* Hence it has been said— 

"Rem tibi Socraticae poterunt ostendere chartae" — 

and 

— " dictae per carmina sortes, 
Et vitae monstrata via est." 

Schiller sings : 

To song, like Fate itself, is given 

To scare the idler thoughts away, 
To raise the earthly soul to Heaven, 

To wake the spirit from the clay — 

and it is significant that the soul of Clytaemnestra did not go astray until 
the bard was dismissed and silenced. — Odyss. 3, 266. 

t Homer and Hesiod made the Greek Gods, says Herodotus. " It was 
the poet," says Goethe, " who first made Gods for us ; who exalted us to 
them, and brought them down to us." — W. Meister's App. 2, 2. 



132 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 



generally, looks jealously at those artistic media 
which, though not always mischievous, are liable to 
become so when misapprehended. Schiller, on the 
other hand, terms aesthetic education the morning- 
gate of wisdom, and Shaftesbury designates the cul- 
tivation of the feelings and affections as the best 
possible introduction to what is truly laudable and 
lovely. 

In the eyes of a severe idealist like Plato, poetry 
was a far too distant and imperfect image of the true 
to be considered more than a hindrance, at least in 
his own day, to the soul's proper work. Though him- 
self a consummate artist, he was unable, owing to his 
preoccupation with the great object he had in view, 
to look upon other forms of art with entire imparti- 
ality ; they appeared as rivals distracting the attention 
which ought to be concentrated on the higher aim of 
realizing the divine image in the soul. It would be 
absurd to confound with this philosophic jealousy the 
antipathy of a portion of the Christian clergy to the 
drama and other kinds of poetry, inherited from the 
ancient ascetical and iconoclastic feeling, and by no 
means implying any essential repugnance to work on 
the popular imagination by ecclesiastical ritual and 
melodrama in the interests of their own supersti- 
tion.* 

Again, among the means of moral improvement 
may be reckoned those images or portraitures of vices 

* As an instance we may refer to the "Docteurs anticomediens" of 
the time of Leibnitz, who would not allow actors to take the sacrament. 
See also Voltaire's lines on Madlle. Lecouvreur. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 133 



and virtues specially termed " characteristics." These 
seem to occupy a middle ground between poetry and 
philosophy, speaking more didactically than the 
former, but with less impressive liveliness- Philosophy 
may, of course, assume all forms, from the liveliest 
dialogue or grandest epic to the driest dialectics ; but 
perhaps its concentrated essence, so far as concerns 
ethics, is nowhere more pithily expressed than in 
the simple enumeration of special phases of moral 
will by Herbart, by him termed the moral ideas. 
Kant's statement of moral principle in the two 
simple postulates of law and individual freedom 
was felt to be too abstract, causing the body and 
meaning of morality to disappear ; some expan- 
sion seemed here wanting, since law suggests at 
first sight a power tyrannically confronting conscience, 
and freedom, which, in its true essence is only the 
law subjectively administered, is apt to be confounded 
with caprice, its better import being rather seen in 
the concrete forms of free justice, free temperance, 
free benevolence. Hence the advantage of resolving 
the colourless law into the prismatic hues of the 
several virtues or virtuous dispositions ; two of them, 
freedom and desire of perfection, applying more par- 
ticularly to the regulation of private conduct ; others, 
as justice and benevolence, describing the forms of 
right behaviour in relation to other men. All should, 
of course, unite in a complete moral character ; indeed, 
to a great extent, they imply and include one another. 
The unity of virtue which Socrates saw ideally 
concentrated in the intellect as wisdom, appeared to 



134 The Eternal Gospel; or, the 

Plato as the practical result of a course of social edu- 
cation ; so viewed, it naturally took the form of justice, 
understood, however, not merely as adherence to the 
social regulations, but in the wider sense of conformity 
with universal order, and especially the just equipoise 
of reason and inclination in the individual soul. Jus- 
tice so considered must include all virtue ; for instance 
wisdom, as the rule ordering for each and all what 
is ^wholesome and good ; fortitude carrying wise 
rules into execution against hostile influences 
internal and external ; prudence or temperance, re- 
capitulating in a word self-regulating wisdom and 
brave self-reliance against wayward propensity, and 
so enabling the individual to work in due measure and 
proportion for the general weal. Aristotle sometimes 
speaks of a perfect justice including all virtue 
relatively to others ;* generally, however, he treats it 
as a virtue specially regulative of social advantages 
and relations ; and then, even though helped and 
enlarged by equitable adjustments, it falls short of 
what is wanted for human needs. So that as Hobbes, 
when striving to bring all duty within the compass 
of civil institution,! finds charity an anomalous 
element interfering with his theory, so Aristotle, 
to complete his moral system, has to turn to friendship 
as the most intense form of benevolence, in order to 
get a foundation for thab self-sacrificing regard for 
others which perfect virtue had been said to include. 
a Friendship, or love," he says, " suffices without jus- 
tice, but justice is not sufficient without love ; indeed, 
* Ethic, Nic. v. 2. t De Homine, ch. xiii. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 135 



of all just things, love is most so ; some even going 
so far as to identify it with goodness."* 

Christianity came to the same issue in a somewhat 
different way. Its moral aspirations were at first 
expressed by the term justice or righteousness 
(biKaioavi rj), a word borrowed from technical Jewish 
ideas of conformity to a superstitiously venerated 
law ; but its real import was ideal, and so it became 
completely identified with morality, or absolute 
harmony of will.f So understood it implied not 
merely perfection but freedom, because emancipating 
the soul from statutory law by a formula exceed- 
ing the law's utmost requirements. It was under 
this latter aspect, namely as free perfection, that 
Christianity presented itself to the mind of St Paul ; 
enabling him to emancipate himself from Judaism 
by transferring the religious emphasis from technical 
legality to the soul or inward disposition. This, 
considering the inherent infirmity of human nature, 
he could only treat as something divinely influ- 
enced or bestowed ; and although it would 
appear in the first instance as a supernaturally 
wrought " faith," adhesion, that is, to the Messiah, 
the ideal personage about whom revolved all the 
moral as well as political aspirations of the Jew, its 
invisible essence would really be looked for in its 
consequences or " fruits," priority among which would 
naturally be assigned to the quality most intimately 
expressive of a good disposition, namely, love or 
charity, to which St Paul, in fact, assigns the pre- 

* Eth. Nic. viii. 1. t Matth. vii. 21. 



136 "The Eternal Gospel ; or> the 



eminence as comprehending all others.* There was 
an ambiguity about the term "justice " consequent 
on imperfect notions as to the nature of Christian 
law which might, and in fact did, lead back to dead 
works and carnal elements ; and hence the utility 
of a phraseology more distinctly suggestive of 
the inward quality desired, such as " grace, " 
as denoting the transcendental source of a good will, 
and love " as its best realization. Love is therefore f 
" the fulfilling of the law ; " for it includes justice 
and more than justice ; not only working no ill to its 
neighbour, but doing him all possible good \% and 
hence the Church of Ephesus declared§ God to be so 
essentially love that this alone suffices to constitute 
divine sonship. Its wide significance receives the 
fullest illustration in that thirteenth chapter of the 
first Epistle to the Corinthians, where it is described 
as expressing more than any other form of excellence 
the quality which is not only of all others the 
most prolific, but also the most lasting ; and this 
because unlike imperfect ephemeral accomplishments 
it is not contingent or superadded, but the very essence 
of the diviner life or Christian disposition itself. 
Abelard and other Christian teachers endeavoured 
to replace the cold un spiritual rigidities of eccle- 
siastical discipline by a more genuine morality based 
on a similar formula, centering the efficacy of re- 

* Galat. v. 22 ; 1 Cor. xiii. t Rom. xiii. 10. 

X See Plato's 'Repub.,' i. 334. "Neminem laede," says justice ; "imo 
quantum potes juva," adds charity. 
§ 1 John, ir. 7. 



Idea of Christian Perfectibility. 137 



demption in the example of love set by God in sending 
His son, an example tending nnder favouring cir- 
cumstances to work a corresponding change in human 
hearts. St John, too, is traditionally reported to 
have signalized the close of his long career by a 
constant repetition of the same lesson. His disciples, 
astonished at the seemingly tedious iteration, are 
said to have appealed to their master, then in extreme 
old age, to explain the reason of his unvarying utter- 
ance of the same words, " little children, love one 
another ; " — " because/' answered the venerable man, 
" if you conform to this precept of our master, this 
alone suffices." " May the testament of John," adds 
Lessing in his report of the occurrence, " reunite 
those whom the Gospel of John has perplexed and 
divided!"* 

* Lessing's 'Testament Johannis,' Wks., Vol. X. p. 49, referring to 
Hieron ; in Galatas., ch. vi. 



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